TAB TUTORIALS: HALLOWEEN HORRORS 2

Whether you’re looking for ghoulish inspiration, aiming to impress a certain someone with your epic dress-up skills or just itching to get involved in the fright-night fever, our second installment […]


Whether you’re looking for ghoulish inspiration, aiming to impress a certain someone with your epic dress-up skills or just itching to get involved in the fright-night fever, our second installment of Halloween face-paint looks are easy to follow using our step by step photo guide.

Look number one: Skeleton

What you’ll need: White and black face-paint, a sponge, two paintbrushes and some black eyeshadow.

Step 1

Tie your hair back before beginning. Using the sponge, paint your face and neck white, leaving the eye area clean. Outline large circles around the eyes with black paint, recreating the outline shown above on the nose and paint a black line either side of your mouth.

Step 2

Next you need to draw the outline of your cheek bones. We know this looks like a semi-sketched phallus is making its way into your mouth, but fear not skeleton friends, this is only temporary! The section nearest the hairline in a wavy shape will be filled in with black paint later. Continue the black line from the edge of your mouth around in a curved fashion. Aim to ensure that both sides of your face look identical.

Step 3

Fill in the eye sockets and the outline on your nose with the black paint. Mark out the sections either side of your forehead which will be filled in in black in the next step. Neatly add lines above the top lip which will be transformed into the teeth. The lines should be quite thin and evenly spaced out, so try to use a thin paintbrush or even a kohl eyeliner pencil if you have one to hand.

Step 4

Taking your black eyeshadow and a brush, dust on a greyish tint to give extra dimension to the face, in a wide v-shape above the eyebrows, either side of the nose and on the chin. Fill in the forehead and cheek outlines that you drew out previously, making the lines as sharp and neat as possible. Mixing the white and black paint, carefully draw on a few cracks around the the eyes and on the forehead. Then get to work on the mouth, using a thin paintbrush, outline the teeth on the top and bottom lips.

The trick here is to ensure that you don’t paint on rectangular teeth, they should taper up to a thinner point on the top and bottom lips, with the widest point meeting in the middle of your lips. Start off with a grey colour and when you are happy with the design, start to accentuate blacker colours on the corners of the teeth where they meet the middle line.

Step 5

The last step simply requires neatening up the teeth. Lengthening the shadow around the bottom jaw will ensure that your new nashers look as scary as possible. If you have a black eyeliner to hand, you can also outline your eyes to make the whites of your eyes pop!

 

Our second look for this tutorial is a beautifully colourful Sugar Skull, inspired by the Mexican Day of the Dead festival.

What you’ll need: White, black, red and blue face-paints (the red and blue colours can be changed as you wish), two paintbrushes, a sponge and a pretty floral headband, glitter is also optional if you want to spruce this look up.

Step 1

Using the facepaint sponge, cover your face in white paint. Simple!

Step 2

Outline the eyes and draw a pointy ‘M’ on the bridge of the nose in black paint.

Step 3

Fill in the outlines in black.
Tab top tip: This also doubles up as a fabulous panda look – simply add some cute ears et voila!

Step 4

Using a thin paintbrush (and with a steady hand), draw teardrop shapes all around the eyes in the colour of your choice. Here we chose to use red as it really stands out against the black and white.

Step 5

Mix the white and red paint together to create a pretty pink shade. Using the sponge, dab pink across the tops of the forehead in an ombré manner, so that the the colour slowly fades downwards. Highlight the tops of cheekbones, then paint a spider web on the forehead – it can be quite tricky to ensure that the lines are the same width the whole way across, so if you’re dubious simply use a kohl eyeliner pencil to trace them out first.

Step 6

Paint on a black smile line either side of your lips. Depending on how moody and menacing you want to look you can either keep this straight or curve it upwards. Next, paint the teeth lines on both top and bottom lips and along the entire length of the smile line.

Step 7

Add some swirls on the cheeks and chin in the colours of your choice. Adding polka dots below the spider web is also a nice way of tying in multiple colours. Feel free to add glitter around the eyes for an extra dazzle and pop on your floral crown for the final flourish!

There’s no doubt that the Skeleton and the Sugar Skull are AMAZING Halloween looks, despite being quite sophisticated and detailed we’re sure that you’ll be able to recreate them easily following our step by step guide. If you’re up for the challenge, tweet and tag us your results on Instagram @sotontab.

For MORE Halloween ideas, see our first installation of tutorials here.