Petal Drops LLC

At a festival you can expect a large group of people just standing around the tent and waiting and watching as I paint one or two if it’s a brother, sister, or sister, sister or best friends getting painted together. We usually pay for a double space just for our waiting families. We always say “what happens in the tent…..gets everywhere!” While I may be the only painter there is always a second person with me at a festival.
At a birthday celebration it’s just me and my Craft-N-Go. I have a dump bucket under the Craft-N-Go because I use a cup system to make sure each kid has clean water and a clean brush. I just dump the dirty mini cups with the dirty water into the bucket between each kid. After the event I have to fish out all the cups before pitching the dirty water but it is an excellent system. (I use it at fairs and festivals too, though occasionally people will try to use it as a trash can and get mad when I tell them it’s not trash.) I use one tall camp chair for the child being painted. Usually there will be one or two kids standing watching because I give them numbered bracelets whenever they ask to be painted. Kids don’t have to wait in line at the party to reserve their spot once they have a bracelet. I always try to paint the birthday kid first. I may warm up with paint on my own arm, but often I demo right on my arm to help a kid decide which color dragon scales he wants 🤓 So lately I have not been doing that as much. It’s such a great process!

I attempted to start a mural business when my kids were little which eventually failed. So I did what any ‘failed’ artist would I packed up my stuff and put my paints away for a number of years. In 2019 at a Bremerton school field day I remembered who I was.
I and another mom armed with two packages of face paint ‘crayons’ met a line about 320 kids long. We flagged down every single staff member we could find and then any willing parent dividing our face painting crayons evenly among them. At the end I had abandoned my chair to a mom and had 3 crayons left to work with. I perched on a stair of a portable and created a sideline. Telling kids I only held black, white, and red. (I did many awful looking Pokeballs) The kids loved it. The bell rang and we had two kids left. We “painted” them as we walked into the building with them. They ALL got painted. It was a crazy fun afternoon. I never really got it out of my system.

I work from a choices board. While the kids get some choices of colors during the process I do not take requests. I did on-the-fly designs for 2.5 years and always felt a little unsettled after an event. There were a handful of great designs but always one or two that I could have lived without. I thought the kids would hate having a choice board only but they actually didn’t. Moreover they hardly ever mentioned the change. So now they, and I are always pretty happy about every design.