Halloween Face Painting Ideas for Kids
Halloween is a fun holiday for kids, where candy bowls overflow and friends gather together for parties and trick-or-treating. It's also the one time of the year when you can go all out and transform into another person or creature. Make your Halloween costume stand out from the crowd by foregoing a store-bought mask and opting for face painting instead.
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Toddlers and Preschoolers
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Kids under the age of 5 generally don't have the tolerance for sitting still very long for elaborate face painting sessions. Nor do they appreciate having a face full of goopy makeup. Keep it simple at this age by using minimal amounts of makeup and opting for simple designs or characters. For a kitty cat, a few whiskers painted on with an eyebrow pencil and a lipstick to create a pink-tipped nose are all that's needed to complete a great look. If your fidgety preschooler has her heart set on having her face painted in painstaking detail like Boots from the show Dora the Explorer, help her keep from getting antsy while you apply the makeup. Let her watch in the mirror or pick out the brush to use for each color; get her involved so she's distracted from thinking about how long she has to sit still. If you use makeup sold specifically for face painting, be sure it's water soluble and free of dyes and toxins.
Grade Schoolers
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At this age, kids generally have a higher tolerance for more elaborate makeup, full-face paintings, layers of makeup and makeup applied to their mouth and eyes. Besides current television and movie characters, this is the age when princesses, witches, goblins, vampires and monsters are popular costumes. Let your child get in on the fun and participate in painting his face. Have him select a picture of what he wants the outcome to look like and together decide on the best way to achieve the desired result. Use sponges to apply a base layer of color over the entire face. This not only achieves a smoother foundation for the rest of the makeup, it looks more like a complete mask than leaving parts of the natural face showing.
Middle School and High School
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Gory features, outlandish makeup, accessories and special effects such as false eyelashes, colored contact lenses, moulding wax, fake scars--these all feature prominently in Halloween face painting at this age. Teenagers often like to complete an entire ensemble costume, blending the base color down the face and neck to where the costume begins for a more complete look. Television characters tend to give way to more abstract fantasy-like costumes that are often a creation of the teen's imagination. According to facepainting.com, face painting on teenagers is usually about finding a topic they like and coming up with a creative image on that theme. This makes face painting fun because there are no limits to what you can do and create when you let your imagination run wild.
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