Face painting hire in Australia: the complete guide

Almost every face painting booking goes wrong the same way, and it has nothing to do with the painting. Someone books one painter for two hours at a party with forty children, the queue never clears, and a dozen kids go home with a plain face and a grudge. The skill you are buying is speed as much as artistry.

So the number that decides your booking is faces per hour, and it is the first thing to ask. The prices on this page come live from the painters listed here, and the spread across the country mostly reflects how long they are standing there and how far they drove to do it.

Anyone painting children's faces is standing very close to them, one at a time, often with a parent a few metres away chatting to somebody else. Every Australian state and territory runs a working-with-children clearance scheme, and the rules differ enough that a painter travelling between states may hold more than one. Ask which they hold, ask for the card or the number, and look at it yourself.

We list acts, we do not check them, so please do not treat a profile on this site as a clearance. A professional painter will have the card in their kit and hand it over without being offended, because school and council bookings have asked them for it a hundred times. Anyone who gets prickly about the question has told you something useful.

City by city, the live range sits in the table underneath. Painters price by the hour with a minimum booking, usually two hours, and the hourly rate holds fairly steady whether they are painting six faces an hour or thirty. That means the real cost per child is set by how fast they work, not by the quote.

Travel is the quiet part of the bill. A painter driving an hour each way to a suburban party has given up half a day, and a call-out fee for outer suburbs or a regional town is fair rather than sharp practice. Ask for it up front and the quote stops moving.

A full-face design takes a few minutes. A cheek or arm design takes a fraction of that, which is why big events run cheek-only menus and get through three or four times as many children. Ask the painter how many faces they manage in an hour at each level of detail, then divide your guest list by that number.

If the answer says four hours and your party is two, you have two choices: book two painters, or agree a smaller design menu in advance. Both work. What does not work is hoping the queue sorts itself out, because the smallest children are the ones who give up and wander off.

Professional painters use cosmetic-grade paint made for skin, not craft paint, and they will tell you the brand if you ask. Ask too about a patch test option for a child with sensitive skin, and about what they do with sponges and brushes between children, because a painter who has thought about it answers straight away.

Worth warning your guests in the invitation: paint comes off with soap and water, but glitter migrates through a house for a week. And a child in a costume for photos later in the day is better painted early, before the sun and the jumping castle have had their way with it.

Public events are a different job from a birthday. The queue is open ended, the painter is on their feet for five or six hours, and somebody needs to manage the line so parents are not standing in the sun arguing about who was first. Ask whether the painter brings a queue sign, a numbered ticket system or a helper, because the good ones have solved this already.

Councils and schools will usually want the painter's public liability cover and their clearance details in writing before the day. Ask for both at booking rather than the week of the event, and give yourself time to chase a second painter if one falls through.