Help this Sneakadoodle Football Player get back in the game with this fun face painting design. Feel free to change out the colors for your favorite team, and this design will become a winner on your board during the football season.

Materials

• Diamond FX white face paint
• Diamond FX black face paint
• TAG royal blue face paint
• TAG skin tone palette
• Paradise grey face paint
• Paradise light brown face paint
• Paradise dark brown face paint
• #4 round brush
• #2 round brush
• #1 round brush

Instructions

1. If you feel comfortable blocking in your design with solid colors immediately, you can skip this step, but if not, use your #2 round brush and white Diamond FX face paint to outline your basic shape. This was a little more challenging than usual, because my model had a bit of a receding hairline in addition to “vintage” skin, which is a little harder to paint. Put the football player on the forehead on one side of the face.

On the opposite cheek, make a cloud shape with pairs of parallel lines coming out of it in five or six places.

2. Now it’s time to block in colors. It’s easiest to do this with a #4 or #5 round brush, but you can choose whatever size feels best for you.

For the cloud shape, I first painted it grey, and then went around the edges with white, blending them together so there weren’t any hard lines between the colors.

3. At this point, your design is becoming less nebulous, but it will still appear quite flat. The outlines we add next with the Diamond FX black and the #1 round brush will give the colored shapes their boundaries and more definition.

4. Now we’re down to the last step of highlights. For the single football player, not much is necessary. I only added one small highlight to his helmet.

The tussle on the field will require several little highlights here and there, though. Although I chose not to, you can add some quick grassy lines about a half inch (1 cm) below the action to represent the field. Make sure you put the grass about a half inch below the image on the cheek so it doesn’t look like the players are sitting on the ground, but that the action is happening above it.

Another detail to consider is whether or not to put white stripes on the football. College footballs have a white stripe on each end. NFL footballs do not. I like the extra detail of the white lines, so I chose to add those to this design.

Beth MacKinney is the owner of and primary artist for Face Paint Pizzazz in the NW Chicago suburbs. She also writes for Examiner.com as the Chicago Face Painting Examiner.