How Long Does It Take to Paint?

How long should it take to paint certain types of faces? For example, how long for simple cheek art, for masks, for whole face like an animal, for smaller eye designs with swirls, for fancy butterflies, etc.
My first face with "real" paint (vs. my eye shadow and eye liner) was a swan mask that I saw a tutorial on. It took me just about one hour. I sat next to the computer and kept starting and stopping the tutorial. The next time I tried the same mask it took me less than half the time. But I would like to know how long things take once you are good at it.
If you could refer to your gallery pictures and say how long certain paintings take, that would be great. That way I could compare the amount of time to the amount of detail.
Thanks so much!
Nanna Niki

I can do 3 - 8 minutes, 10 minutes tops. I am not a pro though.... I am sure a lot of the folks on here can do it a lot faster.

What kind of faces can you do in 3 minutes and what in 8 minutes?

The one of the flag in my avatar took about 5 minutes. 3 minutes for a simple cheek design, 5 or so on a quickie "tribal" thingey, 8-10 on a full face or very detailed mask.

A seasoned professional should be able to paint a full face in 5 minutes or less. (Not a magazine worthy piece of art, just a design from the menu board.) No one starts off painting that quickly of course, but I feel that it's necessary to be able to paint designs in the 5 minutes or less range when charging hourly professional rates. Cheek art takes me about 1-2 minutes and half-faces are about 3 minutes. Those times are for practiced designs that I know by heart. It always takes a longer when creating new designs (thinking time, lol) or when referring to a photograph.

Here are some examples of practiced designs from my menu board...

This takes me around 1 minute:


This takes me about 3 minutes:


This takes me about 2 minutes:


This takes me about 5 minutes:


Hope this helps! You will get much faster as time goes on, and as you memorize your designs.

also painting yourself takes longer, at least in my case

maximum 10 minutes or you need to keep practising. It should take you 5 minutes when you get going.

I facepaint about 10 kids an hour, i think that's reasonable for full faces. depending on the design I do more or less in one hour.

And that including the talk about what design and coulor...
cleaning there face from all the sugar they ate etc...

I ask € 35,- excl. tax (19%) per hour, I think that's the prize my work is worth in this area...

Take care, love Jantien

You also have to take into consideration cleaning brushes, kids getting in and out of chair, chit-chat, wiggling, cleaning hands etc. when figuring out your speed. It may take 5 minutes to paint a face but it might translate to 6 minutes when all the rest is added in. To figure out my time I count faces at a busy events and divide it by the number of hours. I have a board of 36 faces that is my current "quick board" I can confidently say I can paint 18-20 faces per hour, some are more complicated and take longer than others but that is what it averages out with all the rest of the extra stuff. A rainbow or tribal design might only take a minute while a cheetah takes 4 but I get a lot of requests for the super quick designs, too.

my designs take from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. You should be able to paint 10-12 faces easily within an hour. Any slower than that, and you're just setting yourself up to be let down. No one wants to wait forever to get painted.

I quote 15-20 faces per hour to clients.

I agree, that standard time is 5 minutes. Some detailed full faces might take 10 minutes. For me, I don't offer it if I can't get it done in 5 minutes unless it's a special customer or event

Whoa, this thread helped me out with timing to. I need to settle on some 'favorite' designs and buy me a timer! lol

Thank you all for the replies. I don't know how you all paint so fast. I don't know if I will ever get there. Right now I am WAYYYYYY too slow. I guess it takes practice, practice, practice.

nikisteel wrote:Thank you all for the replies. I don't know how you all paint so fast. I don't know if I will ever get there. Right now I am WAYYYYYY too slow. I guess it takes practice, practice, practice.

Everyone starts out slow.. but after painting literally 1000's of faces, I can safely say that I can pull off 44 kids an hour with super simple designs, no problem. That's just the way it works. When you first learned to tie your shoes, you weren't a wiz at it the first few times.. but now you can do it at lightening speed, without looking, and you probably can tie them with a short cut or two of the steps. Same concept.

when you're watching a baby learn to walk and the baby falls, you don't say, "Stupid baby!" ... he's just learning. When you are learning to do something new, you aren't stupid either, you're just learning something new.