I've recreated today my fishy lips facepaint from two halloweens ago. Unfortunately, my grandfather passed away the day before Halloween so I never got to wear it out. I had intended on matching it with an all blue outfit with some streamers attached to the body to look like the ocean.

The facepainting portion is very simple and anyone can do it. In the original edition (with bolder, brighter colors) I had used this kit from Snazaroo. They're high quality paints that lay on nice. This time, I used year-old crayon face paints. These served their purpose last year when I was a Roy Lichtenstein painting with my boyfriend (but that's an instructable for another day), but I wouldn't recommend them. They don't get he nice color that a tropical fish deserves. Go for a nice paint with a good paintbrush.

To get started on your face, wash and dry it well. Then most people recommend swabbing it with witch hazel, but I don't always do it.

Step 1: Draw the Outline

Start by drawing the outline of the fish. It starts at your lips, then bumps up on top to make the eye socket. Continue back along the cheekbone, leaving about a 1.5 inch gap where the fin will meet the body. On the bottom, draw a curve back from your lower lip to your jawbone, then up to the base of your ear.

Step 2: Fill in the Stripes

Using the red paint, mark out where the stripes will be, then fill them in. We'll go over them again and do some blending at the end, so don't worry about them too much for now. You can also fill in the yellow/orange stripes right now if you want, but I actually went back to them later.

Step 3: Draw the Fin

Starting at the top of the eye socket ridge, outline out the top of the fin, then draw a curve back down to rejoin the body. Trace the inside with the yellow paint, and then alternate in between yellow and red and use your finger (or a clean brush) to blend it in.

For those following along exactly as I did, this is also where i colored in the yellow stripes of the fish's body.

Step 4: Draw in the Eye

Make a white oval about the size of a nickel in the eye socket outline. Trace it with the blue paint and then add in the iris. The eye is crucial to the personality and comedy of this fish, so even though it seems simple, take your time with this step and make it nice.

Step 5: Tailfin

Without a doubt, this is the most complicated part of drawing the fish. Starting on top where your initial outline ends, take the tracing color and draw back and up along your earlobe, then from the bottom and below your earlobe. I used the red paint along the very bottom of my ear to connect the top and bottom parts of the tail in back. Then, alternating between red and yellow, fill in stripes going from the cheek out towards the back of your head to color in the fish.