You never know what kind of design requests you’ll get while face painting. My strangest one to date was from a child who asked for a manatee, a duck, and a snail—all on the same arm. (It turns out she had these three stuffed animals at home.) Since farm themes are quite common for parties, today’s chicken design will help prepare you for the odd chicken request and can be made versatile by adding stencils to flesh it out or by using only one of the chickens as cheek art.
Materials
• White face paint
• Yellow face paint
• Orange face paint
• Red face paint
• Black face paint
• Small filbert brush
• #4 round brush
• #1 round brush
Tutorial
Load your #4 round brush with yellow and create a nest in the middle of the forehead just above the eyebrows. Load your small filbert brush with white and for each chicken, make a round circle for the body and fill it in. For the head, make a triangular bump on the top of each circle. For the wings, turn your filbert on its edge and sweep in a curving motion toward the body of the chicken several times on each side. Add a few feathers which aren’t attached fluttering around each chicken.
With your small round brush and orange, add two tiny teardrops connected at the wide part for the beak.
Again using the small brush, add a red comb on the top of each chicken’s head and a wattle below the beak.
Add two black dots for eyes for each chicken and two legs. You might choose to use brown for the chicken’s legs, because I found the black was a little dark for this purpose, but if you’re in a hurry and you’ve already got black on your brush, it’s faster to go with black.
Finally, add some “straw” lines in the nest with black and white and add motion lines around the wings. I chose medium blue for the movement lines because I felt black would be too dark, even though it’s the color traditionally used in cartooning for this purpose. You can experiment and decide what looks best to you.
Beth MacKinney is the owner of and primary face painter for Face Paint Pizzazz, and she services Elgin, Illinois, the NW Chicago suburbs, and northern Chicago, as well as the eastern suburbs of Rockford. Stop by Facepaint.com to check out her other face painting blog posts and tutorials.