Category: DESIGN THEMES

Various themes that face paint designs can fall under

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Two Jewelry Webinars This Month!

I’m very excited to announce that I have TWO webinars coming up next week on the topic of realistic jewelry, one of my favorite things to paint!! Each one will cover different topics and different jewelry pieces. The first one on Monday will be available free through FacePaint.com, but you do have to register to be a part of it! The second webinar on Thursday is for the FAM club for the Facade Academy in the UK! In order to watch this one, you must be a registered member of the FAM club! Read below for more info and links to register for both!

Monday, September 16 – Facepaint.com Live Webinar

On Monday, September 16, 2024 at 5:30 PM EST Gretchen will be doing a live webinar via Zoom and/or Facebook Live! This is a free webinar, but you do need to sign up to get the link! Click here to register for this free webinar and interact with us live! In THIS webinar for FacePaint.com viewers, Gretchen will walk you step by step through some realistic gemstones, and turn them into jewelry that pops right off the skin! While painting a realistic gemstone, Gretchen will demonstrate realistic lighting and shadow placement, and as she turns the gemstone into a piece of jewelry, she will help you to identify some of the most common mistakes people make when painting realistic jewelry. Gretchen will walk you through the gem itself, a setting, and a chain to turn it into a piece of jewelry, and how to create a realistic drop shadow underneath. Time permitting, Gretchen will also create a decolletage design while demonstrating some tools and tricks that help to paint gems, lace and beads/pearls more quickly!

Thursday, Sept 19 – FAM Club for Facade Academy Webinar

On Thursday, September 19th, 2024 Gretchen will be a guest instructor for the FAM Club by Facade Academy, based in the UK! This webinar will be live via Zoom at 8:00 PM UK time (2:00 PM CDT). In order to participate in this webinar, you must be a subscribing member of the FAM Club! Click here to find out more about the FAM club and how to join! In this special webinar tailored for FAM Club members, Gretchen will be applying the lighting and shadow principles that FAM club members have already been learning in September to jewelry designs. She will be combining these principles with the tools that face painters have on hand to create realistic designs that can be done quickly on-the-job, including a wrist/cuff design that incorporates a gem, a decolletage design that includes stones and different bead shapes, and time permitting, a forehead/tiara design that uses other speed enhancing tricks and tools!

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Tuesday Tips @ 10: Stencil Trick!

Happy Tuesday! Here’s a little trick I used when painting a Christmas sweater on my son a couple days ago for my Christmas cards! I love that he still lets me do this! This year I used a lot of fun stencils to speed up the process, and finished it all in 1 hour and 20 minutes (photo below). Have a happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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Tuesday Tips @ Ten: Super Easy Snowflakes!

Happy Tuesday! Today I’d like to share a great tip that I learned from my artist friend Linda John! I’ll show you her cool trick for making super easy snowflakes without using any stencils or even a brush!

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Tuesday Tips @ 10: Shading the Death Star (or a Sphere with a Dimple)

Happy Tuesday! Since Star Wars Day is just a couple days away, this week I decided to incorporate a Death Star design into my tip! The death star is a perfect example to show how lighting and shadows change on a convex sphere, vs a concave dimple. Check out today’s video for a mini lighting & shadows lesson and a fun design to use this Thursday!

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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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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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Step by Step: Google Eye Bat

I’ve been on a google eye kick lately! Here’s a fun bat design that uses “human-style” google eyes! These eyes have fun colored irises, as opposed to your typical google eyes with just a black “pupil.”

Step 1:

Load a 3/4″ angled or flat brush with a pink & purple split cake. I pulled the neon pink & purple from my Superior Sunset base blender. With purple on top, paint the outlines of the wings.

Step 2:

Use a fluffy brush to blend the pink down over the eyes, and feather the purple. I love using my Cameleon large blending brush for this!

Step 3:

Paint some pink for the insides of the ears. I left a couple little tears in the edges of his ears!

Step 4:

Add a little texture to the inside of the wings. I used my mini stencil kabuki brush and purple with a HAS 5701 stencil (from the “Alive” set) to create a little texture, and wrapped it around and under my eyes a bit.

Step 5:

Using your favorite round brush and black, paint the bat’s head, tuft of hair, and wings.

Step 6:

Using a small round black loaded with white, add a smile, fangs and highlights. I also used a halftone stencil to fade the head onto the bridge of my nose. Finish it off with google eyes applied with Pros-Aide II, and some fun chunky glitter! I used “Valley Girl” Pixie Paint!

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How to Paint a Sweater Texture

Just in time for your ugly Christmas sweater paintings, I’ve put together a super quick video to show you how to create a cable knit sweater texture! It looks super detailed, but really it’s just a matter of finding the right sized tools to make the size knit you want, and then repeating a pattern of short strokes and “stamps” with a petal brush. Enjoy!!