Not a school. We're not teaching people how to face paint from scratch.
Not a club. This isn't a casual hangout for hobbyists.
Not another online course. There's no shortage of good ones out there — this just isn't that, and it was never meant to be.
Face Painting L.A. Academy is professional growth space for artists who already have real skill and talent and want to keep sharpening it — with support, mentorship, and a community that understands what this career actually requires.
Face Painting LA Academy is where working professional face painters, airbrush artists and specialized MUA's come to fine-tune their craft, grow their business skills, and connect with peers and mentors — so the life of a professional artist becomes sustainable, not just survivable.
This is in person, by design. Not a webcam, not a screen, not a course you can pause and forget. Real technique is learned in the room — watching hands move, feeling pressure and blend in real time, getting feedback face to face. That kind of growth doesn't happen over Zoom, and we're not interested in pretending it does.
It's built on 20 years of Artistic LA's standard: brilliant, humble, ethical, and always still growing. The Academy is where that standard gets passed on — not lectured, but lived and shared.
Working professional artists who already have the foundation — this is fine-tuning, not remedial training.
Artists who want structured, honest feedback on their technique from people operating at the top of the industry.
Artists who want the business literacy that rarely gets taught anywhere: the ins and outs of the changing artistic landscape, handling difficult clients, colleagues, protecting your rate and body.
Artists ready to both learn from and mentor others — growth here runs in every direction, not just top-down.
Craft Fine-Tuning
Live sessions and feedback focused on refinement — new techniques, faster workflows, adapting to different event types and client expectations.
Business Literacy
The practical, rarely-taught side of a sustainable art career: reading a contract, understanding liability insurance, pricing your work, and recognizing a good agency from a bad one.
Mentorship, Both Ways
Senior artists mentor newer ones. Newer artists bring fresh technique and energy back to the group. Karina mentors directly — but this isn't a one-woman lecture series. It's a working community.
A Shared Legacy
Legacy here isn't about handing down trade secrets — it's a common goal every artist on the roster shares. The better this team works together, the more it shows: clients notice when a group of artists is easy to work with, supportive of each other, and operating at the same standard. That cohesion is the reputation.
The goal is for that reputation to outlast any single person running the business — including Karina. Twenty years of standards and relationships, carried forward by the artists who live them, so the name keeps meaning what it's always meant, regardless of who's at the helm.
Internship & Mentorship Pathways (Future)
As the Academy grows, structured internship and mentorship tracks will give newer artists a real, guided path into the industry — connected to real bookings, not just theory.
There's no shortage of international online face painting courses right now, and many of them are genuinely good — IFPS is exceptional. Self-learning, though, is disconnected from any real community. There's a gap between these two we are wanting to fill.
Face Painting LA Academy exists in the creative room — at Secret Forest LA, alongside working artists, with real feedback and real relationships. It's not personal it's just learning. It's a growth experience that couldn't happen the same way anywhere else, built where the industry's biggest opportunities actually live.
The life of a professional artist needs constant support. Most artists in this field are self-taught, self-managed, and mostly alone in figuring out how to make a career of it last. Face Painting LA Academy exists so that no one has to do that in isolation — and so the standard Artistic LA has built over 20 years continues, in good hands, for years to come.
