New Fast Faces
It's time for new menu boards! This is a big job that we only do once a year: updating our menu board with new designs for the coming season. This menu board is our "fast faces" that we use for large events where we're painting as many people as possible. This is our most challenging board to put together, because we want a good mix of designs that will appeal to both boys and girls from young to old. And we have to be able to paint them FAST! I'm excited about this year's designs!
Of course, another reason I'm excited for new designs is that we end up painting these faces a LOT. Like...hundreds or thousands of times for each design. So, by the end of the season, you aren't sad to see the old ones go. It's fun to test your creativity and breath some new life into your art with fresh designs.
I thought it might be fun for you to see how these designs evolve with input from all of our artists. Last summer I suggested a scorpion design for this year's fast faces board. I painted this one as a demonstration. It's not terrible, but I think you'll agree that what we ended up with as #10 on the menu is much better. I love the tribal swirl in the middle of the scorpion's body! I'm expecting this to be a popular design, and I really like how Dawna improved on my idea.
Another design that has gone through several incarnations is what we call the "Narnia Eye" It's basically a neon rainbow background, with black teardrops and swirls on top. As you can see, it started off a little unruly (this one was never on a menu board, just a not-so-great attempt at a new design back in 2013.)
Here are a few more recent versions of the same design. As you can see from #11 on the new menu board, this year's version is a little more compact, and I like the size and shape of it. Every artist will add their own spin to a design, but we do try to stay pretty close to the picture on the menu board so that guests know what they're getting and don't end up disappointed.
This design is always popular because the colors are so bright and attractive. And it looks good on everyone!
Here are our "Fast Faces" menu boards from 2015 and 2014. As our company grows and we do more and more events, our talent, speed, and consistency improve. I think you can see that improvement when comparing our earlier menu (2014) to this year's version.
Above is the menu from 2015 that we've used for the last two years. You'll notice we kept several of the designs on the new fast faces menu. The mustache, butterfly, skull, tiger and rainbow are always favorites!
These "fast faces" from 2014 weren't really as fast as they needed to be in order to keep the line moving quickly. We try to keep these designs to 2-3 minutes per person, so we had to move to smaller designs on some of them.
Here's to a new year of face painting and lots of fun (fast) events in the future!
