Author: gfleener

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Jams: If you can’t find one, host one!

Have you checked out our event page lately? We have a lot going on! Besides teaching at the MAX Convention in St Louis this April, I’ve just posted THREE upcoming jams for March and April! I LOVE jamming and try to host a jam every month in my home. I have hosted 51 jams since I started opening up my home to jamming in 2015! Covid was the only thing that forced me to stop for a while, with everyone working from home in our house!! Now I have one day a week when I can host jams and that’s Tuesday, so for the time being that’s when my jams will be! 😉 HOWEVER, I’ve decided that I couldn’t decide this time and in March I’ll be hosting TWO jams. One for balloons, and another 1 week later for face paint! In April I’ll be hosting a GEM jam where we’ll spend some time making bling clusters!

But there aren’t any jams in my area!

I hear from a lot of artist lamenting that there are no jams in their area. And to this I say, “then make one!” Hosting a jam is not hard. You really just need a time and a place, and a way to get the word out! If you prefer to start small, start with just having one creative friend over to work on projects with. Don’t want to host in your home? Check out your local community rooms. Most libraries have rooms you can book. Many local restaurants and even grocery stores have community rooms! Just be sure to get approval to use glitter or bring your own vacuum!

What do you DO at a jam?

You can make a jam as focused or loose as you like. I’ve been to jams where everyone works on the same things together. I like to keep mine super casual. While I may pick a general theme like face paint, balloons, gems or henna, they are always open to whatever people want to work on…I don’t ever want a twister to feel like they can’t come to a paint jam, or vice versa! Most of the fun is just in hanging out with fellow entertainers and eating pot luck, am I right?! Sometimes as artists in this field, we just need a place to go connect with like minds and practice something we don’t make time to practice when we’re at home.

I have incorporated some other fun topics into jams. One time I did a belly painting jam and invited pregnant moms to be painted which was SO fun! A couple times I’ve invited people to bring their gear and supplies they don’t want anymore and set up a “garage sale” table where we could buy stuff from each other. Another time I did a “photo jam” where I set up a photo backdrop with lighting in the garage and invited some kids over to be painted. We were able to get some nice photos for our websites, menus, etc!

What about the food?

Feeding people doesn’t have to be hard either, but it does help if you jam for a long time! (The time FLIES way too fast at my 6 hour jams!) For my jams I just have everyone bring some sort of food item to share and we do pot luck, which is always fun and easy. I used to just pick up a couple Papa Murphy’s take-n-bake pizzas for my jams, but then ours closed over Covid. Boo! But pot luck is always good. If you host your jam at a local restaurant’s party room or grocery store, people can grab their own food there too which the venue always appreciates! If you’re lucky enough to live in a place with predictable good weather, you can even do an outdoor picnic jam at a local park!

Here’s a photo from my paint jam earlier this week! I may have been painting faces for 27 years, but I LOVE that I learn something new EVERY time I hang out with my artist friends. One of my favorite sayings is, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room!” We ALL have so much to learn from each other, no matter how long we’ve been painting. If you live within driving distance of Minneapolis/St.Paul MN, join us sometime!! If you don’t, I hope you can either find a jam in your area or host your own!!! I decided when I started hosting these, that even if nobody showed up, I would still just utilize the time to work on whatever I needed to practice. If one person showed up, I had a friend to practice and be creative with! It’s really a win-win!

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Interior Window Painting

Today I got the opportunity to paint on the interior for a new Dunkin’ Donuts location! It was a fun job…two windows to do. One has a “now hiring” message and the other “coming soon!” It’ll be a challenge to remove the “coming soon” window next month when they open, being in a tight spot, but hopefully it’ll be warm enough to paint outside by then! This set of windows took me roughly 6 hours to complete, from when I arrived to when I left. Check out the time lapse below!

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Tuesday Tips @ Ten: Bricks with a Brush

What do you do when you can’t find your favorite brick stencil? For this week’s tip I’ll share how I make perfectly uniform bricks with NO stencil! I still love my stencils, but when I misplace mine or just forgot it at home (which, let’s face it, happens a lot with stencils), this is what I do!

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Tuesday Tips @ Ten: Organizing Design Menus

I have tried many different design menu options for display and organization. I’ve had huge magnetic menus with each design a magnet…I’ve had sign frames and stands with printed menus, and I’ve had menus as simple as a piece of laminated paper. In the end I keep going back to that easy-to-print and store, standard, letter sized piece of paper! This week I share with you how I organize and store my menus, and then a really fun way to use them if you watch to the end! Apologies for the technical difficulties I had this morning…so today’s tip was NOT posted at 10. But, here ya go!!

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Tuesday Tips @ Ten: Smaller Brush Tubs

Tune in every Tuesday at 10:00 am central time for a tip from Gretchen Fleener of Paintertainment.com! Our tips are geared mainly towards face painters, though may be applicable to other forms of artistic entertainment as well! This week’s tip is on the subject of brush tubs! Gretchen shows you what she uses for a more compact brush tub, and a little trick to add back those scrubby ridges in the bottom of the tub to get your bristles clean!

Here are a few links!

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4 Speedy Snails

Today I was practicing some balloon twisting, and working on coming up with a few variations of a snail! The little orange one is just a single 160 balloon with a yellow scrap. The pink & yellow one uses two 260’s and one pink 160, while the bigger one with the chrome shell uses three 260’s and a white round!

It’s super useful to have multiple ways to make different things, not only for the ability to adjust your speed at an event, but to account for any variations in the supplies you may have packed!

It got me thinking of course of how we do this same thing with face painting. I can do a quick cheek art version of something, a more detailed half-face, or a full face, for many of my designs! So I thought I’d put together a little video of the amount of variety you can achieve JUST within the CHEEK ART category alone! Here I start with s super fast snail that is made up of one pounce of a dauber and three teardrops! I then go on to add a little more detail, stepping it up with google eyes, and finally with more shading and festival glitter! The variations are endless, but I hope you enjoy this little sampling of speedy snails!

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2022 Year in Review

Happy new year!! I always love to look back on the previous year on new year’s day.

It’s SO hard to pick just one photo from each month, especially those summer months! But here are just a few highlights…

Window painting – My little covid pivot has really paid off this year, as I took on 4 brand new clients and got repeat work from my existing clients. Dunkin’ is definitely my biggest window client, and their locations grew from 4 to 6 stores this year, which now gives me about 24 painting jobs every year just from them! This year I did interior paint jobs, exterior, and vinyl!

The Glitter Glamper – The Glamper had a huge year!!! In May was our first year participating in the MN State Fair’s “Kickoff to Summer” over Memorial Day weekend. We were slammed for 5 days, and I believe this was the Glamper trailer’s foot in the door to landing our new fair location, as shortly after I was offered a huge, new space to park the trailer in August at the MN State Fair! In between the two, the Glamper set up camp at Interlachen Country Club (our 2nd year with the Glamper there) for the 4th of July, and we also set up at the Carver County Fair for 5 days in early August. This was the year I really got to see my Photoshopped renderings of this Glitter Glamper concept turn to reality!

Private Sessions – I love painting for private sessions! I don’t do a lot of them but when I do they are SO much fun. This year I got to paint Rachel’s belly for the 2nd time, this time with a super cute “Up” theme! I also had the opportunity to paint Diane to complete her jester costume for Halloween!

County Fair – This year’s Carver County fair was like no other! I was able to bring in the Glamper and set it up right outside the building where my face painting booth has always been, and bringing in some of my amazing team of artists to help, I was able to juggle two booths at once! I had SO much fun having friends with me (normally I work alone here), and my boys got a chance to run the cash registers too!

MY AMAZING TEAM! – In looking back at my year’s worth of hundreds of photos, my favorites are always those of the amazing artists and family members without who’s help I would most certainly NOT be able to pull ANY of this off! Thank you all for doing such amazing work in sometimes very challenging scenarios, but always with smiles on your faces! You all make my job SO much fun and I am SO INCREDIBLY thankful for each and every one of you! Here’s to many more adventures in 2023!