A few days ago i had my first experience working around a beard. The man wanted this monster face i do that has a white base coat and he had a black beard. I had a lot of trouble working around it. Have any tips about working with beards and mustashes?

I wish I did.

The best option, where possible, is to modify the design on the fly to accomodate the individual. The point of any design is not necessarily to repeatedly duplicate that design, but to suggest ideas you feel like painting, and satisfy the core desire of the customer -- and that desire is not necessarily the exact design that they see on the board, but rather the theme.

He wanted a monster.

Your monster design obviously involves the mouth area. Maybe it has scary teeth or whatever. But could you not, just as easily, create a monster with a normal mouth and crazy eyes? To elaborate, perhaps you could paint his cheeks to reveal the muscles and an exposed eyeball or something, or perhaps add some extra eyes on his cheeks and forehead? It's work of course, and a bit of a gamble, but it could certainly be done.

And yes, I know these are probably not the answer you were looking for. As I said, I wish I did have some slick trick for working over and on beards. Maybe someone else here will.

Make it look like he was chewing on roadkill?

Rather than try to work AROUND the beard, I would incorporate it into the overall monster design. Use "obstacles" to your advantage.

Without seeing how long this beard was, it's kinda difficult to give you alternative ideas.

If the beard was long enough that you could hold onto it and tug on it, I probably would have painted part of the beard (like a V shaped goatee beard at the chin area) using UV red (because regular red will likely show up too dark to be noticeable) If this looked good, then I would have moved on to his face using black, white, gray, olive green, maybe some murky goldenrod for "highlights" of his bone structure and then adding a few touches of the grim bloody red elsewhere on his face to balance out the red in his beard--not to forget that possibly the ears and neck could be incorporated into the design to work the monster design beyond stopping at the beard. By working beyond the face area, you are camouflaging the beard to let your eye follow through with the entire design.

Now why didnt i think of that...probably cause I haven't been doing this as long as you...lol. That would have worked really well considering it was a demon-ish face.

I would hope a customer with a thick beard would understand that a little paint can't hide the beard. It would have to be one hairy skeleton... I have found that face size/shape and length/style of hair all play a part in determining what chnages will have to be made to the base design.