Transition to Professional

I am face painting this Friday at my daughter's school. This will be my last volunteer face painting event for the school since it is our last social fund raiser for the year and next year she moves on to middle school. I have always provided my own supplies for these because I was horrified when someone suggested I do the painting and that I could just acrylics or watercolors. I never submitted to be reimbursed for my painting supplies so I can keep them. Actually would go through about one and a half of those little snazaroo sets they sell at Micheals at each event. I am now using diamond FX and paradise.
I want to move into doing face painting professionally. I actually have a degree in art and do fantasy art for a living. While I still consider myself a newbie after 2 years of doing the volunteer work, I think my past experience with painting for a living for 10 years made me pretty competent after a couple events with moving, wiggling, bouncing canvases.
This seems like a good chance to advertise myself as a professional though.
I have my business cards from my fantasy art work, but have not made the changes yet to my website to include face painting, mainly because I am not real good with computers. So I was thinking about flyers. What sort of information should I include on a flyer? I have a FB page dedicated to my face painting already.

Also how do you go about presenting yourself to local businesses? Do you have a flyer to explain what you do that you mail, call them, go to the business and ask to speak to someone in person? Do you have a portfolio or just direct them to a web site to see your work?

I am joining our local guild next meeting and still need to get insurance which is on my agenda soon.

Hi. See if there if a group that will insure you like "Duck for cover" as your insurance will cost you less.
I have found that advertising doesnt work that well as just getting out there and making your cards available at a gig. People see you in action and want your card because they are impressed with what they see.
I applied for fairs and council gigs and sent some good photos of my work with the applications even if they weren't requested.
Let community centres know your are available.
Quite often i will get 2 or 3 jobs off of one gig just because people have seen what i do.
My first one was actually for a girlfriends childs birthday party and things went from there.
If you can do around 10 full faces in one hour then you are good to go.
All the best!

With 3 of us working the school carnival last October we did about 300 faces in 3 hours. 1 helper was not there the whole time and the other didn't work as fast as I did. Granted he did boy designs better and I did the girly full face butterflies really fast so when we got a kid that wanted a design the other did better we handed them off, which I think helped our speed. And that was before I discovered the joys of rainbow cakes.
The Christmas event wasn't as packed and I probably did about 40 faces in an hour and a half.
I did an adult party in Feb. where it was mostly pretty eye designs and tentacle eyes, which I could do in less than a minute each provided the victim wasn't too drunk. And drunkeness mostly effected how long it took them to stop talking so I could effectively paint and then to get them up out of the chair after I was done. I don't think I want to paint drunk people anymore.

these are exactly the type of events to get u the exposure you need.
Gee even heather at silly farm only contracts for 20 faces an hour! Have you checked her stuff out on youtube?

I didn't consider my face painting of quality work until I got to the end of that 3 hour event oaf doing over 100 faces. Trust me, at the beginning the $1 a face was a fair price. But I got that butterfly mask down by the end of the event and would have charge $5 for it. It was also the first time the teachers and parents were commenting about specific designs that I did that they saw around the carnival that they were particularly impressed with.
It was the work I did at the Christmas party that had me considering going professional and I went to my first guild meeting in Feb. and learned about rainbow cakes. My poor daughter is tired of being used for a practice head. I had to print up a face drawing and laminate it to play with.

And the worst part is that I haven't been working on my fantasy art for the last 2 months because of this obsession with practicing face painting. And that is how I make my living. Thank goodness royalty checks are still coming in, or I would be able to afford the FP supplies I have been buying.