23/10/2025
Event organisers please read this!
🎨 Things Professional Face Painters Wish Event Organisers Knew🎨
🎨Professional face painters aren’t vendors.
🌈We don’t sell products — we create experiences.
🥳We’re artists and entertainers who bring colour, smiles, and atmosphere to your event, encouraging families come along to an event, stay longer and enjoy themselves more.
Frequently we’re invited to attend events on a “pitch fee” basis, often £50 or more for a “pitch fee” as though we were selling goods rather than providing entertainment.
It’s a common misunderstanding, and we always try to explain how our work is a little different. Whenever that happens, we suggest a few fair, workable options:
✅ Organisers can charge customers per face to recoup our fee
✅ The cost can be included in ticket prices
✅ Or a local sponsor can cover it so guests can enjoy the activity for free
However, it’s quite common for organisers to decline those options, and that’s absolutely their choice.
What they don’t seem to understand is that if we were to pay the pitch fee, the financial risk shifts entirely to the face painter, which simply isn’t sustainable for small creative businesses like ours.
So, here’s why pitch fees don’t work for artists and entertainers like us…. 👇
✨If a professional face painter pays £50 to attend and charges £5 per face, they’d need to paint 10 children just to break even.
✨Each design takes around 3–5 minutes, so that’s roughly an hour of backbreaking constant face painting, purely just to cover the pitch fee.
✨At a two-hour event, the entire first hour would simply pay off the pitch cost — before even beginning to use the second hour to cover our:
• Professional-grade paints, glitters, and hygiene supplies.
• Travel time, fuel and preparation time
• PL Insurance, and gazebo/equipment.
• Setup, pack-down, and full cleaning of the entire kit afterwards.
Once all of those costs are taken into account if we’re lucky to earn enough to cover the above, what then remains (if anything) is often less than minimum wage….. and this is even before weather or footfall are factored in.
So, when a face painter politely declines a pitch-fee booking and suggests booking them on an hourly fee basis, it’s never about not valuing your event or being difficult or greedy, it’s simply about fairness and sustainability and valuing ourselves and our skilled industry.
We absolutely love bringing joy, sparkle, and atmosphere to local events, and we want to keep doing so in a way that’s viable for everyone involved.
🎭 Face painters aren’t vendors. We’re artists and entertainers. Just like musicians, magicians, character actors, or any other performer, we’re part of what makes your event memorable.
✨ Please include us as entertainment in your event budget — and let us add the magic, not pay for it.✨
Thank you ❤️
