Face Painting Ideas for Kids

We just finished up our week of spring break. It was a delightful time of sleeping in, and staying in our pjs too long, and eating leisurely, drawn-out breakfasts (like this one — yum!) and — a few days at least — not doing much of anything.

On those days when we didn’t go anywhere, we baked cookies, and painted the dog with water (naturally), and one day — broke out the face paints.

I don’t tend to think of face paints except around Halloween, but we need to do this more often. It’s one of those open-ended activities that I can hand the kids and let them take over. And the things they come up with are much more imaginative and creative than any face painting ideas I would have dreamed up.

We used these face paints from I Love to Create — they worked really well. Face paints are tricky, because you want them to stay on while you’re playing with them, but come off easily when it’s time to wash up for church or family portraits or other places you don’t really want your nine-year old looking like a tiger.

My tendency for projects like these is to try and take over for the kids so I can show them all the cool things that can be done. But if I just sit back and watch, they always surprise me. And they played for hours. We’re definitely going to keep this activity in rotation for the summer. I’m also going to keep it on-hand for things like our neighborhood bike parade and block party.

If you need some face painting ideas to get you started, I found a few. I tried to keep them simple, because I’m not very artistic when it comes to drawing things (and because then the kids can do them themselves):

-a Penguin

-a Spider

-easy Elsa face painting (my four-year old will die)

-a shark

And this Klutz book is one of the best. My sister had it when she was little, and it’s just been updated with new face painting ideas and fun designs to make.

If you’re really brave,  you’ll let the kids do your face, too.

Have fun!

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