The Basics of Animal Face Painting

If you’d like to use the most popular designs you should definitely practice animal face painting. Animal themes vary extensively in design-you can create spots, stripes, whiskers, fangs, cat’s eyes, dog’s “black-eye”, pug nose, beaks and so much more! This article will show you the basics of animal face painting and how to further enhance your skills.

The first thing to do is to acquaint ourselves with some of the most basic animal designs. The most popular beginner’s design is the butterfly and bunny. Here are other animals you can portray in your animal face painting:

- Lion -Tiger -Cheetah -Cat -Dalmatian -Cow -Chicken -Owl -Sheep -Pig

With these samples you can already learn and create so many kinds of patterns. To get started, here are basic animal details:

1. Making Spots - use round brush to make dots and spots. With this simple animal face painting technique you can create Dalmatian spots. Try drawing a circle around one eye and filling it in with solid color to create a dog’s “black eye.” You can then move on to creating cheetah spots by making solid dots and then creating a circle around them.

2. Making Stripes - you can use stripes to make basic tiger and zebra designs. Create wavy lines across the face with a brush. There are many books available that can show you where to direct those lines.

3. Noses - creating noses are easy. You can simply apply a black, pink or red spot on the nose.

4. Beaks - learn how to paint on beaks that have the illusion of “sticking out” of the face from books or online information on animal face painting.

5. Eyes - animals’ eyes can vary. Paint on a vertical line that has a thicker middle and pointed ends for cat’s eyes.

6. Fur and feathers - there are many books that will provide you with information on how to create the illusion of furs and feathers using paint alone.

Now that you know the basic animal face painting designs and patterns, prepare yourself for actual face painting. Here is a basic procedure:

Step 1: Identify the color combination and make a palette of colors for your design. For example, a tiger is going to need a color palette of orange for the base, black for stripes, yellow for eyes and white for the lower eyelids.

Step 2: Find out how your model wants his or her face painted: partially or entirely. For those who don’t want the whole face to be painted, add some animal-like features only in a small area like the eyes or part of the cheek.

Step 3: Start painting! The typical animal face painting procedure is by first painting on the base with a moist sponge and placing the details or animal patterns with a brush last. Now that you have the basics on animal face painting, learn more about specific procedures on each animal and advanced techniques online.