Quick Dinosaur Face Painting Designs Webinar with Kathy Vergara

Dinosaurs are one of those requests that never slows down. Kids ask for them constantly, and a good painter can turn one out in just a few minutes. In this webinar, longtime FacePaint.com favorite Kathy Vergara walked us through her whole dinosaur toolkit, from a lightning-fast cheek design to a full-face triceratops and even a dino skeleton. Whether you're brand new to face painting or looking to speed up your line work, there's a version here for you.

About Kathy Vergara

Kathy Vergara is a New York City-based face and body painter who's been teaching with FacePaint.com since the very beginning of our webinar series. She's known for her relaxed, encouraging style and her motto that there are no mistakes in art, only opportunities to work with what you've got. Beyond face painting, Kathy creates striking Halloween and special effects makeup, and yes, if you search for the best Halloween makeup artist in NYC, she tends to pop up first. Her teaching is all about giving you achievable techniques you can actually use on the job.

Kathy's Recommended Products

Here are the products Kathy reached for throughout the session:

• Kraze FX Face Paint — her go-to for the bone-colored base on the skeleton design
• Fusion Body Art Paraffin White — teeth and crisp highlights
• GTX Face Paint — mixed into a custom neon orange and yellow split cake for background texture
• Silly Farm Angle Brush — the workhorse for laying down the base dinosaur shape
• Starblend Powders — dry-brush shadows and stencil detail
• Split Cakes — quick leaves, backgrounds, and smooth color blends
• Scale and texture stencils — for the full-face triceratops
• Round detail brush — teeth, outlines, and fine line work

Start With the Quick Cheek Dinosaur

Kathy's everyday dinosaur is a cheek design that reads as either a T-Rex or a raptor depending on how you shape the head. It's quick, it's impressive, and kids light up every time. She builds the base with an angle brush loaded in teal, blue, and green, laying in a plane over the top of the nose and setting up two eyes to create a three-dimensional feel. As she says, these faces aren't anatomically correct, and that's the point. Take some artistic liberties.

Don't stress about perfection at this stage, because most of the design comes together in the outlining. On a real child's face, the brush naturally fills the smaller space, so this actually goes faster on a kid than it does on a practice board.

Add a Background for That Extra Wow

To make the design pop, Kathy adds simple greenery with one-stroke leaf shapes. It can be as messy or as involved as you like, from a couple of quick leaves to a monstera, flowers, or a stencil if you have the time. On the job, the dinosaur alone takes about three minutes, and the full background version runs around five.

For texture, gradient dots are one of her favorites. Use a barely-damp dabber, keep the water to an absolute minimum, and choose a color that either contrasts or complements the dino. A bright neon orange or a sunny yellow both look fantastic scattered behind the leaves.

Depth, Highlights, and a Little "Spit"

A super dry brush is the secret to Kathy's dimension. She layers in shadow around the mouth and eye with a burgundy or dark brown, then adds highlights with a light yellow that isn't quite white, saving pure white for the brightest points. Painting the eye in a color other than white first lets you drop white on top as a highlight for extra life.

Her favorite ferocity trick comes from her venom makeup days: little globs and drips of "spit," dotted lightly and stretched from top teeth to bottom, give a monster or dinosaur a wet, about-to-bite quality. It's gross in the best way, and it takes seconds.

The On-the-Job Version

Most of the time on a busy line, you won't have five minutes to spare. Kathy showed a stripped-down cartoony version that hits the same shapes without the shadows and highlights, and it comes together in about two minutes. Same base, same energy, a fraction of the time. For an arm or hand design, she likes to run creatures like dinosaurs and sharks right over the hand so the teeth open and close, which kids love.

Going Bigger: Triceratops and Skeleton

For a full-face look, Kathy keeps things to a mask-style triceratops rather than covering the whole face, especially with darker colors that can be tougher to remove. She builds the horns and crest with dry layers so the white stays bright, adds depth with Starblend in the recesses, and finishes with a scale stencil for texture.

The dino skeleton is a crowd-pleaser too. She paints the bones in a warm bone-beige tone (not white), shadows underneath each rib to push the back ones into the distance, and outlines with white at the very end to make everything stand out. It's a great reminder that skipping white as your base color gives you somewhere to go with your highlights.

Kathy's Pro Tips for Working a Line

A few gems from the session worth keeping in your back pocket: offer the illusion of choice by asking what color a child wants rather than what kind of dinosaur, so you keep the line moving. Almost any color works for a dinosaur, so lean into green, blue, purple, or whatever the kid loves. And remember that dino skin is textured, so your highlights and outlines don't need to be perfectly smooth. A little scraggle adds personality.

Above all, keep Kathy's mindset front and center: there are no mistakes, just choices you work with. That's exactly the spirit that makes face painting fun to learn and even more fun to do. If you want more sessions like this, keep an eye on our upcoming face painting classes and webinars.