Seriously struggling with skulls...

So for some reason I just can't do skulls and yet it is always the choice of the most squirmy, fidgety, impatient, looking around everywhere boys. And then when I've done one then the kids see it and all want one - I struggle to get a quick skull out that I'm happy with. I was doing a mask style - don't have any pics cause I was too ashamed of it but now thinking of doing a vertical half face for half face and still working on my full face one. It is really annoying me that something that should be so simple - 2 colours and limited detail is eluding me. This is one I did last night. My awesome partner who never gets painted let me practice on him for hours and kept washing his face and coming back for more, but I'm still just not happy with it. And my blood looks meh. Any tips for getting out a really quick scary skull???

what helped me A LOT was just looking at clip art of skulls. Not real ones, but just clip art. It helped me get an idea of where the openings were and what it would look like "flat" an then transfer that onto a face.

Just keep in mind that you are actually painting ON a skull!! So just use a pic of one and transfer those lines and negative spaces onto the face.

I'm not sure if that is much help.

You are missing the frown lines up near were the eyebrow meets the top corner of your eye... makes them look angrier.
-and you need to make the cheekbone more defined - it helps if you can imagine the skull structure under their skin... so each skull will look different according to face shape. I often get the kids to do a big smile so I can mark out where their natural cheekbones are - very hard with round little pudgy faces. If I'm doing an adult I get them to frown so I can follow their natural scowl marks... and grimace to get the square of their jaw and cheekbones.
Hope that helps you somewhat...
These are both my hubby..... like to give credit to Sean Avrams as I took inspiration from him...... look him up if your looking for skull inspiration... he rocks.

And before you say anything - yes yes I'm fully aware my husband looks like he's 15 yrs old... what can you do, the guy just doesn't age!

a stipple sponge is good for blood splatter!

If you can take a class with the Wolf Brothers, they made a huge difference on my skulls.

Follow the bones on the face. You can bring off skull pictures to see what parts need to be shaded and what need to be highlighted.

Small tip from me...round eye sockets are not scary...they are friendly, so if you want a scary skull, make them kind of like the green one in Tash's photos, you can even bring it further down into the corner of the eye, I'll try to post a picture this afternoon of what I mean...stay tuned...

Tash, I love your smiling model!

Cool. That bottom one of Tash's (or similar) has been in my file for a while to try - think I saw it on the Snaz site? DH is lucky he's on nights for the next few days but maybe I'll have to try on myself... the eye sockets thing makes sense and the frown lines..thanks!

This one is simple but effective.

Wow. Thank Anita.
I can actually see that working on a squirmy impatient boy - it always seems all the kids that want skulls are the most fidgety... if only I could paint boys as flower fairies and butterlies...

That's really clean Anita - I really like it.

Make sure to shade in the temples & the bone structure of the forehead. here's a few(and I agree... only the squirmy boys want them... or the ones with massive bangs).

This is with Starblends & Wolfe Black

Om my there are soo many ways to do skulls Try a few takes on the variations and figure out what you can do fast.

I line to shade with my sponge - as I think skulls do well with more shading and less big impact in the blackened areas. But then I take my brush and add a line to define the shaded areas and smudge that line a bit with my finger. A mean looking skull has a heavy brow. And the hollow area next to the mouth helps define it as a true skull mouth. A few cracks.

I generally paint a take on Kurt Drake's skull as published in the Wolfe FX and Face Art company's first book. I love Kurt and his work and that green skull has ste the standard for face painting skulls. Except at Halloween I do all my kids skulls in color lime, lt blue, or lt purple (or pink) and adult skulls in color or white. If I am doing white I like to muddy up some yellow/lt brown with my dirty whit to give the bone and aged look.

I posted some skulls in my gallery of me painted by Pashur and Mark - I have to pull out some others of me by Brian and Sean. And some others of mine.

I think I finally got it! This one was done on sat at the show so it was a quickie job but I was happy enough with it to stop and take a pic