Here are some easy body painting ideas that look great and are not that hard to pull off. Over my 7 years of professional body painting, I’ve developed some go-to designs that people love and I use all the time. These designs are great for almost any environment, whether it’s a bar, costume party, a music festival, or any kind of event where you want to do something different and stand out.
The beauty of these designs is that they are easy and repeatable – they never get old and give you lots of latitude to get creative within the frameworks.
This article covers easy body painting ideas for women, men, and ideas that just work on everyone. Whether you’re using an airbrush body painting setup like I do, or you’re using a brush, sponge, or any other kind of painting method, these ideas are tried and true and you can start using them today.
Easy Body Painting Ideas for Women
An easy way to body paint women and make it look good is to take advantage of their curves. Where it might seem hard to find large areas on women that you can use as a “canvas”, the trick is to “wrap around” the body with your artwork. These 3 ideas act as a great frameworks for making easy body painting concepts look impressive on women.
The Paint-on Clothing
The paint on clothing concept is one of my favorite body painting ideas for women. A really talented body painter can paint on realistic looking jeans, shorts, shirts and bikinis. I am not one of those painters with the skill level required to make the body paint look like real clothes. However, if you imagine how clothing might wrap around a woman’s body, you can paint on straps, gloves, leggings, tops, or any other articles you can come up with. It’s actually very easy and can give your model a kind of “clothed” feel without making it look exact.
Remember to take advantage of your model’s curves and make the artwork “wrap around” her entire figure.
The Side Wrap-around Piece
This side wrap-around piece is another way to make curvy figures carry your artwork well. When you’re looking for a great spot to place a great feature in your artwork, try to place it on the side of your model’s hip and thigh area. This gives the artwork a great “wrap around” effect and really allows your model to rock her poses. The trick is to plan a feature on the side of her body and connect them with interesting designs. This takes a viewers attention away from the frontal, square, (and frankly boring) parts of your model’s physique, and gives the body paint a flowy and interesting feel.
The Belly Centerpiece
The belly centerpiece body paint design works great for mostly-clothed women that have this part of their body exposed. It acts in defiance of the “take advantage of her curves” idea which I just advocated (in art, rules are made to be broken). The beauty of body painting on the belly is that it’s a nice large, segmented, and flat area which acts as a sort of “canvas” – you can take a concept that works well on flat canvas and transfer it right onto her body.
You can easily paint a slogan, logo, or almost any kind of graphic and it will look good on a woman’s belly. The great thing about the belly centerpiece is that you can easy link it with other body paint features like the side wrap around.
Easy Body Painting Ideas for Men
An easy way to make body paint look great on men is to give them an excuse to take their shirts off and show off their muscles. These easy body painting ideas are tasteful and eye catching ways to serve as that reason.
The Chest Piece
Men generally have bigger bodies than women. In the same way that the belly offers a great segmented area to place an art piece, the chest serves the same purpose on men. Take any graphic, logo, design, or stand alone art piece that works on a canvas, and you can do the same thing on a man’s chest. Either make a center-piece spanning across both pecs, or just focus on one – both designs look great. It also works as a great connection into the neck area or into a sleeve.
Upper Body and Neck (The Travis Barker Look)
Body painting the entire upper body and neck works great for a few different reasons:
- Gives a perfect excuse to take the shirt off
- Makes a full-body “Travis Barker” tattooed look (makes you look tough)
- Doesn’t require painting the legs (which are usually hairy af, skinny, ugly, and not worth wasting the paint on)
A full upper-body piece really comes together when you also paint the neck – for whatever reason, it just connects the whole concept and makes it look badass.
Easy Body Painting Ideas for Everyone
Some body painting designs just work on everyone, men and women alike. As a body paint artist, these are the ideas that I use as my staples and I them pull out when I need to paint tons of people fast. They’re easy, straight forward, and make your model look great.
The Arm Sleeve
Arm sleeves work so well because the arm is a good segmented area that has some interesting curves and features to play with. If you paint someone’s arm and pull their actual sleeve over the edge of the body paint, it really gives it an arm-tat feel. It looks badass and gives you so much latitude to mess around with different styles. Your model can look down and appreciate the artwork they’re wearing and feel good about rocking it for a night out.
The Face Mask
There’s something alluring about wearing a body paint face mask. It gives your model a mysterious vibe without coming off like a bank robber. Face mask body paint is perfect for masquerade type events or for just adding a mischievous tone to a night out. To really pull this design off, try to make it symmetrical and use small subtle designs on face ridges such as the cheekbones and eyebrows. Play around with painting the neck, head, just the eyes, or around the cheeks. There’s no rules so get creative!
Black-Light Fluorescent
Glow parties and body paint go together like ham and cheese sandwiches. As soon as there’s black light involved, this is a perfect opportunity to get your hands on some fluorescent paint and go wild. As an airbrush artist, I use Createx water based acrylics for all of my glow body paint – the colors mix well and allow me to seamlessly layer fluorescent sections on-top of the opaque ones. Putting black and white on-top of the glow paint also makes a cool “positive/negative” effect – I recommend playing around with this concept.
Createx Paints work amazing for airbrush work but you can also use it with a brush or a sponge.
There you have it. Some of the easiest body painting ideas that you can learn to do very quickly and guaranteed to look great!
Whether you’re a body paint artist or a casual that wants to paint your friends for a fun night out, these concepts will help you get the effect you want.
If you like the effect that you can achieve with airbrush body paint, checkout my other article about the cheapest and easiest way to get into airbrush body painting.
Body painting is fun for everyone involved – the artist gets to express themselves on a dynamic canvas, the model gets to rock some sick looking artwork, and onlookers get a cool visual experience. I hope this article has inspired you to get out there and have some fun!
