When you're at an event, setting up a system for speed and efficiency will help you make the most of your time with your clients. It also displays your attention to excellence, because nothing looks less professional than haphazardly rifling through a table of supplies while on the job. It also can be helpful if you have an assistant artist working with you, because having a system set up in advance will make it easier for her to do her job.

When you're at an event, setting up a system for speed and efficiency will help you make the most of your time with your clients. It also displays your attention to excellence, because nothing looks less professional than haphazardly rifling through a table of supplies while on the job. It also can be helpful if you have an assistant artist working with you, because having a system set up in advance will make it easier for her to do her job. 

So I've got my Craft n Go, and I'm going to use the surface of it while I'm showing you my organization system for glitter tattoos.

What I've done is I've taken my menus, these are laminated, and they came that way when I ordered these stencils. On the other side, I made a photocopy of that. If your glitter tattoos come with a menu, I would definitely make a photocopy of that and put it inside your book. These menus are going to be out so that kids can see them, and so that they can make decisions about what they want for their glitter tattoos. But it's good to have a copy inside your binder, and these are just page protectors that I'm using for this.

The reason it's a good idea to have a copy inside of your binder, is that if something happens to your menu, you have that extra copy. I have sections for each category, so this page for example, is my princess section, and I'll also put a post-it note so that I know exactly what this section is for. When I turn the page, I get into the actual glitter tattoos.

This page isn't something that kids would have access to during my event. This binder is my binder and it's where I keep my glitter tattoos so that I can get at them when I need them. For each of my glitter tattoos, I have put a piece of card stock in the pocket. These pockets are actually the kind of pockets you use if you're collecting baseball cards, so they're great because you can get 9 of them on a page, and for the most part, they actually fit. You can also get larger pockets, if you have larger stencils, but these work great. So in each of these pockets, I have cut little piece of card stock, and slid them in there. And the reason I did that is because it really creates a barrier between this page and the next page.

This is a copy of the menu that I put in here, so that I know what's in this section just at a glance. I don't have to page through the whole section to find out what's in it. I can just look at this first page and know.

If you're organizing your stencils and they didn't come in a grouping like that, I would suggest grouping them according to maybe superheroes, or princesses, animals, sports, etc...

You'll notice every once in a while, there is a pocket where I've sliced the pocket (because this is really two pockets), and I put packing tape on the inside and the outside of that slice. This made a double pocket, because some of them are actually too large to fit in just one pocket. If you have that, you can do it that way, or there are protectors that are available that have larger pockets.

If you want to make your own menu, all you really have to do is line up all your stencils and photocopy them.

So when I'm at an event, what I do is I put the menus out for children, and then the book stays with me. Kids do not have access to the book. In my old system, I once had a parent grab my stencil book (it was a much smaller book), and she assumed that it was actually for face painting. Before I could stop her, she picked it up off my table and said "Oh I want to look at this!". She picked it up upside down, and all the stencils fell out. So you really don't want parents or kids to be able to get to this. You want to put it in a place where it's more accessible to you and then you can put your menus in a place where it's more accessible for the children.

To organize your stencils using this system, you'll need the following items:

• A three-ring binder
• Baseball card pocket pages (9 to a page)
• Regular page protectors 
• Glitter tattoos stencils
• A laminated photocopy of your stencil menu for display
• A photocopy of your stencil menu for the binder
• Sticky notes for making categories/groups of stencils

Beth MacKinney is the owner of and primary face painter for Face Paint Pizzazz in Elgin, Illinois, and her artwork has appeared in The Colored Palette and SkinMarkz magazines. She services the western and northwestern Chicago suburbs, Chicago’s north side, and the eastern and southeastern suburbs of Rockford. Stop by Clownantics.com to enjoy more of Beth’s face painting tutorials.