Cheek painting is a great activity at school carnivals, picnics, parks and even just at home. Children enjoy picking an image for each side of their face and the surprise of finally seeing it on themselves when it's complete.
Picking the Face Paint
If you are going to paint the faces of strangers, or if you're going to charge for your services, pick hypoallergenic face paint. Children who have allergies may break out if the face paint is poor quality or non-hypoallergenic. Search online the face paint you are looking for, or look at a craft store. Pick a kit that comes with a few quality paint brushes. Some kits come with glitter, or you can buy glitter to stick on the child's face afterward.
Display
Make sure that you can actually paint the images that you say you can paint. Do a test on a piece of paper. Draw each design and make a display the children can pick from. Keep your designs simple, colorful and easily recognizable. You may want to avoid any commercial images like cartoon characters, because these are much more difficult to replicate quickly.
Ideas for Girls
Girls tend to be attracted to rainbows, flowers, stars, hearts, puffy clouds, suns, butterflies, snowflakes, comets, mermaids, smiley faces, dolphins, horses and unicorns and teddy bears. Items that are cute, pink and symbolic of love or friendships are all hot items for girls. Remember to keep the image simple. Children have small cheeks, so be sure to keep the images well-contained.
Ideas for Boys
Of course there is an overlap between boys' and girls' preferences. Boys like some of the same things as girls, like stars, suns, comets, smiley faces and teddy bears. Be sure to include some images in your repertoire more specifically geared toward boys. Cars, trucks, rocket ships, snakes, dragons, turtles, bumble bees, airplanes, spiders and spider webs are just a few examples.
References
Do research online if you need an image to refer to when creating your face paintings. Clip art makes for an excellent reference because these images are usually broken down with cartoon-like simplicity, making them easy to look off of and imitate.
