Halloween Crafts: Painting Pumpkins

Ever since my kids were old enough to hold a crayon in their hand, they’ve loved art.  Whether it’s painting with a brush or their fingers, or drawing or coloring, art has always been fun to do and is often therapeutic.  Unfortunately, due to budget cuts in our local California schools, art is either non-existent or a very small part of the classroom agenda.  Lucky for my six year old, if we stroll past the arts and crafts section of any store I will always oblige her innermost Van Gogh when asked for paints, chalk, or even a sketchbook.

This time of year the Halloween crafts and decor are abundant in the stores, on porches, and in the media.  Not even the first day of fall yet the leaves and pumpkins on store shelves get you in that autumn mode.  Creativity means mixing things up once in a while and Pumpkins are orange, a primary color you see every Halloween. BUT, we wanted to give them a little paint and transform them a bit, I was inspired by the pumpkin stem looking like a witch’s nose…here’s what we used.

6-7 mini pumpkins (we used craft but real ones work too)
black felt
craft glue
black, green, and white paint
paint brushes
scissors
pipe cleaners in black
a stapler

What we did first was paint the pumpkins.  This was my daughter’s favorite part.  She loves painting and let me tell you, it is very relaxing just to stroke the paint back and forth over anything.  In our minds we thought of black cats and witches and ghosts. So let’s see what it would be like to change these pumpkins into something else entirely.  Going black is the easiest, with acrylic paint we could get away with one coat and some touch ups.  To make “witch green” we added black to the bright green and mixed.  It was perfect and good again with one coat.  White for ghosts need about 2-3 coats, if you’re patient.  My little one and I are not so much.

We didn’t use too much of it, but I traced a hat pattern on the black felt with white chalk and my daughter cut out the triangle and circle shapes.

Black pumpkins turned into a cat and a spider with pipe cleaner legs.  My daughter got a tad frustrated with the craft glue and the felt and pipe cleaners not sticking well.  I’m not shy to look for a tad bit of help, so we had to reinforce with staples, no more tears!.

White Pumpkins turned into a ghost and a skeleton!

Green pumpkins turned into a witch and Frankenstein.
After all is said and done, our creations were altered and tweaked, and we were proud of what we came up with, what do you think?

I am participating in the HERSHEY’S BOO BLVD. campaign via Mom Bloggers Club. This post was sponsored by HERSHEY’S. All opinions expressed are 100% mine