Face Painting

This program almost didn’t happen because I forgot one very important item: A mirror. The program took place in the activity room, and at the last minute I realized that without a mirror, it’s kind of hard to paint your own face. I snagged a $6 full length mirror at KMart and it worked really well. If I do it again, I would use two mirrors so people can spread out more.

My tweens tend to enjoy more process-based activities, whereas the teens I’ve worked with have been more drawn to assembly-based projects with specific instructions. The two groups are from different communities, and their preferences change so often, that I won’t rule out programming ideas for a certain group, but I’ll change the focus slightly.

For face painting, I printed out examples of easy ‘monster’ paint: A scary jack-o-lantern, a spider on the cheek, and zombie eyes. Once the tweens arrived, though, it was clear that they were interested in creating their own designs.

We had several kits from the Halloween store, as well as some nicer face-painting kits we’d picked up earlier. Because it was the week before Halloween, the face paint was kind of expensive. If I do this program again, I’ll do it off-season, and plan to pick up the clearance makeup on November 1. Even though we had some makeup left over, I didn’t save it for sanitary reasons. Everyone was sharing (using Q-tips to dip into the paint, but still), and the palettes were a greasy mess. I didn’t want to give germs a chance to grow, and then recycle the germy supplies a month later. I wish I could have given each person their own kit, but that gets expensive. It’s also hard to plan for if your regulars are drop-ins.

A quick note: I removed the fake blood from all the packages, and I’m so glad I thought to do so. It was a messy program anyway, and adding fake blood would have been a little too crazy for my group.

Another note: After reading the warnings on several packages, I taped up signs that said:

DO NOT USE THE RED OR PURPLE MAKEUP NEAR YOUR EYES OR MOUTH!

Which was a pain, because they wanted to do joker makeup, or use the red like lipstick, but they couldn’t. Next time, I’ll include some red lipstick.

Everyone was pretty good about sharing. The main behavior snag came when one person wanted to paint another participant’s face. I try to emphasize ‘Hands to Yourselves!’ as much as possible, and some people became upset about the way their friends were ‘helping’ with their  makeup/sticking their fingers in other people’s faces without permission.

Nobody really stuck to a plan in terms of monster design. Everyone wound up with a lot of paint smeared on their smiling faces, and that’s all I care about.

Oh, and one more thing: If you’re going to do a facepainting programs, set out containers of baby wipes….everywhere.