How to Paint a Sugar Skull… On Your Face!
Celebrating Day of the Dead this year? Or thinking of dressing up as a Dia de los Muertos sugar skull for Halloween? Then you’re going to need makeup, face paint, and a few fake flowers. For this Halloween hack, we decided to do a two-face look, with half as the sugar skull and the other half as simply dressed up. By going for the half-face approach, you can avoid being frustrated with trying to get a symmetrical design, and half of you still gets to be the real you ;)
Read on to see how it’s done!
First, you’re going to need a serious arsenal of makeup. Here’s a list of what we used, though you can freestyle based on what you have and what’s available locally.
Materials:
– Black eyeliner pencil
– MAC Chromaline Pods (we used Hi-Def Cyan, Rich Purple, Primary Yellow, Black Black, and Landscape Green)
– Kryolan Shadow Palette
– MAC Glitter Pigments (we used Crystalled Blue, Crystalled Orange, Crystalled Green, and Crystalled Pink)
– GOSH Eyeliners (we used Purple Satin, Hot Flamingo, and Intense Blue)
– Your regular “dress-up” makeup (for the non-skull half of your face)
– brushes
– sponge brushes
After each step, always set the color with a matching powder. This will ensure nothing smudges!
We’ll start things off with painting half the face white, and creating a flower around one eye.
1. Start with a clean face. Apply normal makeup to half of your face.
2. Paint a white line down the middle of your face.
3. Fill in the entire white side with white face makeup or face paint.
4. Apply blue eyeshadow to the eyelid.
5. Use the blue paint pod and tiny brush to draw the shape of a flower around the whole eye. Fill in with paint and set with shadow.
6. Outline the flower petals with blue liner pen.
7. Use a black eyeliner pencil to draw a circle around the edge of the flower.
8. Fill in the flower and set with black shadow.
9. Creepy!
Next, it’s onto flowers, spiderwebs, and teeth, oh my!
10. Using paint paint, draw a flower on your forehead on the unpainted side of your face.
11. Add a yellow dot in the middle.
12. Add green leaves!
13. Use black eyeliner to outline the petals, leaves, and yellow center of the flower.
14. Draw on a spiderweb using black eyeliner right in the middle of your forehead. Set with shadow.
15. For the eyebrow, draw a swirling brow above the blue flower and set with shadow.
16. Outline the lips using black liner.
17. Continue with the liner to create a skeleton-like line extending from the mouth to the ear.
18. Add a purple flower (with yellow center) to the chin.
And finally, the finishing touches.
19. Add white dots around the perimeter of the blue flower, in the black circle.
20. Draw a half heart upside down to create a skeleton nose with black paint. Set with shadow.
21. Apply a deep pink lipstick to the other side of the lips.
22. Using a dark brown shadow, shade the face by smudging a light line along any part that has black lines to create depth.
23. Apply mascara as you normally would.
24. Add some fake lashes!
25. Use eyelash glue to attach gold rhinestones to the center of each flower petal.
26. Top each of the flowers off with glitter pigment that matches each color.
27. Take a selfie and send it to your husband!
For hair, we curled to create soft waves and pinned half of it up.
Add flowers to the painted side of your face, and pin up soft curls on the other side to keep it glam.
And there it is! Spooky!
Of course, we had to head outside to creep around a little bit…
Maximum creepiness happening.
Rawr! All in all, this is an easy and fun way to decorate your face for Halloween or for a Day of the Dead celebration.