Sunday, December 14, 2008

Basic Animal Face Painting

By Rashel Dan

Basic Animal Face Painting

Animal designs are among the most popular face painting designs. 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

These simple animal designs can already give you a world of different patterns. To get started, here are basic animal details:

1. Spots - can be applied by dotting paint on the face with a round brush. 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 - to make a nose, all you have to do is simply apply a black, pink or red spot on the nose.

4. Beaks - beaks are best created by the illusion of "sticking out" from the face. For step-by-step instructions, search books or online information on animal face painting.

5. Eyes - animals have different kinds of eyes. Paint on a vertical line that has a thicker middle and pointed ends for cat's eyes.

6. Fur and feathers - for a step-by-step instruction of how to create the illusion of furs and feathers with paint alone, you can search for online books on face painting.

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: Determine whether you are doing an entire face painting or doing a partial face painting only. 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: You can 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.

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