Painting Pumpkins

I hate pumpkins guts. Due to this I have a love hate relationship with carving pumpkins. This year for my Halloween party instead of carving pumpkins we are doing a caramel apple bar. More on that on a later post.  (Anyway back to the pumpkins). Since we are not doing them at the party I can do whatever I want this year. I decided I wanted to paint my pumpkin. It is of course less messy and I do not have to get my arms and hands full of goop.

What you will need to do this project:
A pumpkin
Acrylic paints ( teal, white, black, red, green)
Paint brushes (I used two large and three small brushes)
A paper plate to put your paints on
Paper towel
A glass of water (I have an actual tray to clean my brushes in if you are not that fancy this works fine)
Paper bag 

First you want to clean off that pumpkin really good they can be muddy. The back of my MINI Cooper knows this all to well. It was raining and I may have thrown dirty pumpkins on the leather seats. Whoops.

Once clean set up your work station. As you can see in some of my pictures my work station is constantly an organized mess. I do a lot of projects so it is organized chaos at all times. I always have a ripped paper bag laid down when painting so I do not get my gorgeous butcher block desk all full of paint. Ryan (the hubby) would die if I let that happen.

Make sure you have all the brushes you think you will need to start. No one wants to be digging around with paint on their hands.

I painted his nose first as I knew teal would require more than one coat of paint. I then moved on to paint the white in the eyes. I thought it would be fun to have one large eye and one small one. After that was done I painted the teeth for the pumpkin. Look at those buck teeth!

 Painting the cheeks red was a fun step and challenging because it is hard to paint a circle on a round pumpkin.

I then moved onto painting the black in the mouth. This is where you want to make sure you wipe your brush off if you get any white on it. Use that paper towel for this!

Once this was completed I could start to go in and do the fine details like outlining the mouth, eyes, nose and cheeks. I also decided to draw on some crazy eye brows.

Notice the paint all over my paper bag? Protecting your working surface is so important.

The very last thing I did was add the green eyes to my funny pumpkin and the white to the cheeks.

For my very first painted pumpkin I think he turned out fantastic. What are you doing this year are you carving or painting? I hope this helped you see there are other options than carving out there.

Until next time~
XoXo Emily