Bringing the animal out in your little one this Halloween – Halloween face painting guide

Discover your children’s wild side this Halloween with an animal-themed fancy dress and these easy-to-follow guides to face painting.

Halloween is fast approaching, and you haven’t created a costume for your son or daughter yet. What can they be? A witch, Frankenstein or maybe a ghost? We know: turn your little ones into creepy crawlies and witch’s pets this Halloween with these easy-to-do face paint designs:

Halloween face painting guide

Spider’s web

Incy Wincy Spider is pretty creepy, right? Well, a spider’s web is probably one of the easiest things to paint on your child’s face for Halloween.

Take a medium paintbrush and dab a medium-sized ball on their cheek; this will be the body. Joining this, draw a smaller ball to form the head. Draw on legs and, with either red or white face paint, draw on some eyes.

Time for the web: to create a basic web, draw a plus sign and draw a line between each of the marks so you have an eight line star. Join up each limb with inverted arcs and repeat in parallel until you reach the edge of the web. Once you reach the edge, expand the diagonal lines slightly so they appear to be gripping the face.

Make the spider extra scary for boys by adding pincers or add glitter for a girl who loves sparkles.

Cat

Who says you have to dress up as something scary for Halloween?

Dress your child up as a witch’s cat this Halloween for a cute twist on the scary theme. Dress them all in black or grey, wear cat ears a tail and paint their face with this easy step-by-step guide.

To create this feline face, you will need a small, medium, and large brush, a sponge and light purple, white, grey, and black face paint.

Start by creating the base. Use a clean sponge to cover the child’s face with light purple face paint. Blend in the grey or black at the edges of the face and down the nose to add a two-tone effect and to add depth. Don’t wash the sponge in between colours as this will help with the blend.

To create the cat’s eyes paint them in black all the way up to the eyebrows and flick out the edges with a medium brush. Draw a line underneath the eye close to the eyelash, similar to how you would apply eyeliner. If you have young ones they may fuss too much for this.

With a thick brush, use black face paint to line the lower part of the nose, along the nostrils and the ball of the nose. Continue this down the philtrum with the line getting slightly wider where it reaches the lips. Paint in the lips black as well; and with a small brush, paint in some dots above the lip.

For the final touches, paint on some whiskers and give your cat patterned fur. For a little added extra, you can add highlights with white face paint.

Owl

Be as wise as an owl this Halloween with this face painting design. Your child could even say they are Hedwig from Harry Potter!

You will need a small brush, a sponge and black and white face paint.

Using a sponge paint your child’s forehead and around their eyes in white so it looks like they are wearing a mask. With the small brush, paint a black border of jagged lines. This can be done with short, quick brush strokes. Draw a similar line straight across their forehead about an inch from their hair line. Between these top two lines will be the feathers. Represent these with quick brush strokes or, if you have time, individually paint these in.

Paint their eyelids in black and join these to the bridge and ball of the nose which should also be painted black. This will be the beak. To complete this design paint in more feathers and twit twoo! The owl face is complete!

What do your children want to dress up as this Halloween? You now know how to face paint a cat so why not suggest that?

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