Face painting for Non-Face painters

A buddy of mine called recently:

"Hey man, would you mind doing a little face painting at a charity event?"

I've drawn a lot of caricatures at charity events, but face painting...not so much.

So I said, "yes."

Well, I learned a few things about painting kids faces. I thought my fellow artists might like to know what to expect if they ever find themselves in the same situation.

FACE PAINTING IS VERY POPULAR
That is, free face painting is very popular. I showed up at 3:30 and left at 9:30. And I was painting faces the entire time. I was actually the last person at a booth to leave.

THE QUALITY OF FACEPAINTS VARY WILDLY
The event host supplied everything I used to paint faces. He left Tempera paint and some paint that was made specifically for face painting. The Tempera paint was super thin. The face paint was thicker, but it wasn't great. Both kinds had to be globbed on to be visible. The result was that making a clean cartoon on a kid became very difficult. Plus, the paint didn't dry especially quickly, so I was painting wet on wet, which, when you have to glob on the paint, is difficult.

PAINT SIMPLE DESIGNS
I quickly learned that you can't get too crazy with the designs. The paint just won't work for that unless you're willing to take a LOT of time...and the kids are waiting!

The most popular designs I was asked to paint were:
Butterflies (by far the most popular), flowers (also very popular), the University of Georgia "G,"  monkeys, cats, tigers, horses, hearts, peace signs, pirates, skulls, rainbows, and dogs.

Here are the templates I developed as I worked.

I developed designs that used big, simple shapes...preferably circular. If I sat down and worked on it I could develop more interesting patterns. The flowers were especially irksome because I don't really know the details of a flower's appearance. I would suggest developing a good butterfly and flower pattern before you go.

Face painting can be tedious and aggravating, but if you have some simple, fun designs you'll have a much better time.

There you go. I've given you a little information that will better prepare you for the onslaught of youth that awaits. Have fun!

The Vocabulary of Improvement

If you can describe a problem you can fix it.

Unfortunately, we're often bothered by aspects of our work we don't name.

The name of a problem contains its own solution, so I want to share with you some words you can use to diagnose problems with your art.

TEN.SION  [ten-shuh]
noun
a situation or condition of hostility, suspense, or uneasiness

Whenever 2 or more elements of your piece are too close, or their angles aren't complimentary, we can say there is tension. You'll feel troubled by the relationship between the objects. When you feel tension, rearrange the objects until they are more harmonious.

BUS.Y [biz-ee]
adjective
full of or characterized by activity

Busy work has a lot of stuff in it--so much that you'll have trouble figuring out what's going on. Get rid of unnecessary elements and reorganize your piece if it's too busy. The solution for business is clarity.

WARM [wawrm]
adjective
 suggestive of warmth; inclining toward red or orange rather than toward green or blue.
COOL [kool]
adjective
suggestive of coolness; inclining toward green or blue rather than toward red or orange.

Warm colors and cool colors communicate differently. A painting made with blues and whites feels different than a painting full of reds and yellows. When painting skin, the areas that are the fleshiest and fattest are redder and the areas where the bones are closest to the surface are whiter.

CON.TRAST [kon-trast]
noun
opposition or juxtaposition of different forms, lines, or colors in a work of art to intensify each element's properties and produce a more dynamic expressiveness.

Contrast is big and small, light and dark, square and round, busy and sparse, sharp and fuzzy... If your image seems boring it may lack contrast. Include the darkest darks and the whitest whites. Make some elements large and other small.

TEX.TURE [teks-cher]
noun
the imitation of the tactile quality of represented object.

Many images lack texture. Skin has pores, clothing is made of fibers and metal is shiny. Texture is good. Use it.

Words like these can be used to diagnose and fix issues with your artwork. When something bugs you give it a name. "There is tension here." "There is too much middle grey in this piece. I need more contrast." "This section has too many lines-it's busy."

We'll pick this theme up again.

Maybe You Should Slow Down

I'm impatient. It's something I get from my dad.

The problem with being impatient is that you:

1) Work too quickly
2) or Stop working too soon

I'm learning from my artist buddies that I need to slow down when I make art.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that some people redraw their rough drafts 20 times before they're happy. Some people repaint areas several times when the composition doesn't feel quite right. Some people make studies of their subjects with 5 different color schemes.

I found out that I didn't really understand persistence.

If you're not happy with your work, perhaps you should slow down your process. Take extra time to fix problems. Revise, rework and remake. Stay on a task until you're satisfied.

This does not mean to rapidly fire through the same drawing 5 times in a row.

Introduce thoughtfulness into your process. Think about what you're doing and how to do it better.

Become curious. Art is supposed to be a fun, rewarding journey.

From the Drawing Board

Here's a Photoshopped caricature of Jayma Mays from Glee.

Good Advice From Copyblogger

I was looking around on Copyblogger and stumbled across an absolute gem:

You can’t drive a car in first gear and reverse at the same time. Likewise, you shouldn’t try to use different types of thinking simultaneously. You’ll strip your mental gears. 

Creating means generating new ideas, visualizing, looking ahead, considering the possibilities. Evaluating means analyzing and judging, picking apart ideas and sorting them into piles of good and bad, useful and useless. 

Most people evaluate too soon and too often, and therefore create less. (emphasis mine) In order to create more and better ideas, you must separate creation from evaluation, coming up with lots of ideas first, then judging their worth later.

Copyblogger is chock full of good information if you're into marketing and blogging:
http://www.copyblogger.com/

How Long Does it Take to Become a Good Artist?

I've been told my entire life that comparing myself to others is a waste of time, and so have you.

At some level you see the truth. You have a certain set of genes. You were raised in a certain place by a particular family. Did you choose your neighbors? Or your appearance? Or the place of your birth? Of course not.

In my fits of pique I whine that I'm not a prodigy or a genius. A genius would have picked up this art business waaay faster. He would be out there making cool stuff instead of strapped to a drawing table making crap.

All this makes me wonder, "How long is it supposed to take to become a great artist?"

Yes, there are prodigies. But prodigies don't spring from the womb with their skills in place. Rather, prodigies exhibit an obsessiveness with their particular art that compels them to work work work work work. If you were obsessed with your art as much as Picasso with his, or Mozart with his, you would find yourself massively skilled in a relatively short amount of time.

Malcolm Gladwell suggests, based on a study by Anders Ericsson, that becoming great takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which is equivalent to 20 hours a week for 10 years.

That's a lot of work.

Regardless of whether you need 10,000 hours of practice, the point is that becoming great takes a lot of effort over a long period of time. If you're obsessed you'll practice more often and learn faster, and vice versa.

The takeaway is this:

Becoming a great artist takes as long as it takes. Getting angry about the process only slows it down.

There isn't an easy path, only the grind.  You might as well learn to love it.