Face Painting: Thoughts On Petal Pots

So there are these awesome things I call 'press flowers', where basically you double load a round paint brush, point the tip to your skin then press it down to make a petal. An analogy would be pretend the tip of the brush is a ballerina standing on her toe, then she goes down on to her heel.

And you get lovely petals that look like this.

Typically you achieve this multicolored look by 'double loading' you brush. You do this by loading up the entire brush first with your light color (in this case white) and then you load just the tip of the brush with your dark color (here I used blue). I have even been able to triple load the brush using this technique, you just have start with lights and end with darks.

Also as stated before the best way to load your brush is to go back and forth, with the bristles and avoid 'swirling' the brush in the paint. You will get a better load this way and it will be less stress on your brush (which will make it last longer).

The only down side to this technique is the issue of reloading. See after yo put that brush in the dark color, it's near impossible to load the light color again with out contaminating it with the dark color.

This problem of reloading has gotten some artists rather creative and thus petal pots were created.

The idea is simple enough. Get some dollar store paint by number style paint pots, put your dark color on the bottom and your light color on top, make a hole large enough for your brush and you are off the to races.

"How cleaver!" I thought, as it pretty much solves the issue with double loading. In fact I was almost going to make my own but then it hit me.... To load the paint... I would have to swirl my brush.

The more I thought about it, the more I didn't like it. I thought about how this would cause more stress on the bristles of the brush, and ultimately make them start to fray a lot faster. I might as well stick my brush into an extremely dull pencil sharpener.

"Feed me your art supplies!"

Then there are all the little reasons. This taking time and paint to create, it being yet another thing to carry in my kit and take up table space etc. And for what? To save a little reload time? The price seemed too high, so I ultimately came to the conclusion that this was not something I wanted to make.

If you really need to reload your brush you can wipe off the dark tip, but I find the best thing to do is just make sure you have a good load to begin with. If you have a good load that will last through all the petals you want to make then there is no reason to reload! The secret to doing this is all about having thew right brush. My older round brushes were long and thin and couldn't really hold enough paint most of the time, but with a shorter and fatter brush, the problem was solved.

I recommend the Silly Farms Petal Brushes, as they are thick and short, thus holding a lot of paint and help to make this easy technique even easier (stupid easy really).

I think having the right tools of the job not only makes the job easier, but it's a lot easier on your brushes life span as well. It's very rare that I have to reload now that I have these brushes.

Problem solved!