How To Do Face Painting: The Dinosaur

Step 1: Prehistoric Paintjob

Our first step is to paint the outline of the dinosaur. The dino's mouth goes over the lips, so as your subject moves his mouth, so will the dinosaur! Using a big brush, paint the head around the mouth, then the tail curls up around the eye.

On a dinosaur's body, there's a very short front leg and a large back leg. So swoop the paint down to create the large back leg. Just paint the basic shape of the dino.

Step 2: Mouth Off

Use pink paint and a finer brush, and paint gums just inside the dinosaur's mouth.

With white and a #2 or #4 brush, paint very sharp teeth. Then, with a very fine brush (a #1 is best) take black and outline the teeth.

Step 3: Outline the Features

Staying with the black, we'll create a nose, nostrils, eye and a little bit of an outline.

For the nose, do a little half-circle for the nostril. Then for the eye, we want to make him angry. So paint a slash for the eyelid, then come under for the eye shape.

Then outline the entire dinosaur body in black. It's okay if your line is not even all the way around. Dinos have duck shaped feet, so keep this in mind.

To make the eye pop, we'll use white around the eyeball- then paint the eyeball with black.

Step 4: Jurassic Details

If you'd like to continue, here are some more details. Take yellow paint and a larger, #8 brush and add some highlights to the body of the dino. Drag the brush so that you're blending slightly, and use a damp (but not wet) brush.

Sometimes, T-Rexes have stripes, so we'll add some stripes in black (or whatever color you like).

To make the dinosaur feel like it's in an environment, we can add some grass around its feet. And you can always add detail by giving your painting some highlights in white.