Three Easy Painted Pumpkin Ideas to Make Your Halloween Decorations Super Cute
Looking for a fun and easy Halloween craft project that will look amazing in your home?
I love Halloween. I love a scary film, I love dressing up but sometimes you just want your Halloween decorations to look super cute! I wanted to create some pumpkins that would look great in my studio, so let's dive straight into this tutorial where I'll show you how to paint these adorable pumpkins!
All three finished pumpkins together, the perfect hero shot showing all three completed pumpkins side by side.
If you’d prefer to follow along visually, you can watch the full step-by-step tutorial here:
👉 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS_PQ-N_lgs
What You'll Need
Before we get started, let me run you through all the materials and tools I'm using.
All the tools and materials laid out - showing the paints, brushes, pens and pumpkins before starting
Paint
I'm using the Dо Crafts Artiste All-Purpose Acrylic Paint in a few different colours:
Lagoon
Rose Pink
Sea Spray
Lush Pink
Iris (a gorgeous lavender shade)
I also have some metallic colours for the stems - silver, gold, and bronze. I wasn't sure which one I was going to go for at first, but I ended up going with gold for all three and I think it looks so cute!
Pumpkins
I'm using real pumpkins although technically these ones are squash! I thought they were kind of cute though, so here we are.
Paint Brushes
I'm using a selection of Creative Peak paint brushes - fan, filbert, and rigger. I have worked with these guys in the past but this is not a sponsored video at all. I just absolutely love these brushes! I also ended up using a Royal & Langnickel Unicorn brush with a flat edge for painting the little ghosties, which worked perfectly.
Other Supplies
Concentrate disinfectant and a cloth - to clean the pumpkins before painting
Cut up kitchen roll tubes - to rest the pumpkins on while they're drying (such a handy little trick!)
Sakura Pen-Touch pens - in gold and black, for the lettering and ghost faces
A pencil - for sketching out the text before going in with the pen
Matte picture varnish spray - to protect the finished pumpkins
Step 1: Prepare Your Pumpkins
First things first - give your pumpkins a good clean! I'm using a little concentrate disinfectant on a cloth to wipe them all over. You want to make sure there's nothing nasty going on under the paint!
Pop your cut up kitchen roll tubes onto your workspace ready for resting the pumpkins on while they dry.
Step 2: Paint the Base Coats
Before doing any patterns or decoration, I'm painting all the pumpkins a solid base colour first, it just makes everything so much easier!
Squeeze some paint directly onto the pumpkin and then use your paintbrush to work it all the way around. A handy tip: start with the base first so you can hold the pumpkin by the stem, then once the base is done, rest it on the kitchen roll and paint the top. It keeps things so much less messy!
Give each pumpkin two coats, leaving a couple of hours drying time in between. Once the base coats are all dry, the fun really begins!
Painting the ombré gradient and blending with the fan brush, showing the dry fan brush blending technique where the two pink shades meet
Pumpkin 1: Gradient Ombré with Gold Lettering
This is the one I'm most proud of and it is just so cute!
The Ombré Effect:
Starting with the smallest pumpkin, I wanted to do a little ombré effect and add some lettering on the side. I painted the bottom in a dark pink and then painted the light pink at the top, lining them up next to each other around the sides.
Then and here's the key, I took my dry fan brush (no paint on it at all) and brushed where the two colours meet. Because this pumpkin has a lot of ridges, just make sure you get in between all of those! One important tip: don't flip your brush the other way while you're blending, because you'll have light pink on one side and dark pink on the other, you want to make sure it's always on the correct side.
You can obviously do this with any colour combination you like, you could go for some more Halloweeny colours like green or orange, but we're going for cute pumpkins today!
The Gold Lettering:
Once I was happy with the gradient, I sketched out the word "BOO" with a pencil first, just to find the best placement. I picked the side with the biggest surface area - that worked really well.
Then I went over it with the Sakura Pen-Touch in gold. These pens write on basically anything and they are so beautiful! Go very lightly to avoid picking up the paint underneath. I did the outline of the letters first and then added thicker downstrokes to give it a faux calligraphy effect. Finished off by painting the stem in gold to match and it just all looks so cute together!
The gold "BOO" lettering being added, showing the Sakura gold pen being used on the gradient pumpkin
Pumpkin 2: Cute Ghost Pumpkin
This is the one I was most excited about and it did not disappoint!
Painting the Ghosts:
For this pumpkin I used the flat-edged Royal & Langnickel Unicorn brush to paint little ghosty shapes. It's simple just paint a round top and then pull down to create the little ghost body shape. I spread them all around the pumpkin and then left them to dry before adding the faces.
Painting the little ghost shapes, showing the flat brush being used to create the cute ghost bodies
The Faces:
For the faces I used the Sakura Pen-Touch in black with the 1mm nib for nice bold lines. I did a variety of different expressions, mostly happy little ghosts, although there is one little sad guy right at the bottom where you can't really see him. Poor little guy!
One of them did smudge a little bit, but honestly? He just looks like he's crying happy tears, so I'm absolutely cool with that!
Finished with a gold stem to match the others and it looks SO cute. I love all the different faces, they all just look so happy!
Adding the ghost faces with the black pen - showing the fun, varied expressions being drawn on
Pumpkin 3: Striped Pumpkin
For the third and biggest pumpkin, I wanted to do a stripe effect using a more turquoise, bright colour.
Painting the Stripes:
I thought about taping it up, but because of all the ridges on the pumpkin it just wasn't going to work, so I did it completely freehand using the rigger paintbrush from Creative Peak.
Rather than painting every single ridge (there are quite a few and some are chunkier than others!), I paired them off painting the more defined ridges and leaving the smaller ones between them. I marked out where the ridges were first and then came back to fill them in. I didn't worry too much about the very bottom either, because you're not really going to see that when it's on display.
Painting the stripes on the third pumpkin, showing the freehand rigger brush stripe technique
Once the first layer dried, I went back in to touch up. First with the light colour to neaten up the edges, and then with the darker colour to sharpen up any lines where the paint was missing.
Finish with a gold stem and you're done! I absolutely love this stripe effect and can you imagine doing it in rainbow colours?! A rainbow pumpkin would look SO cute. Maybe next year!
Step 3: Seal and Protect
The very last step is to give all the pumpkins a spray with a matte picture varnish. This protects the paint from flaking off, and because it's matte it won't affect the look of the pumpkins at all.
The Finished Result!
I am so in love with how these turned out! The gradient ombré with the gold "BOO", the happy little ghosties, and the striped pumpkin all look so cute together. I've gone for pinks and turquoises because they're my brand colours and they're going to look so cute in my studio in the run-up to Halloween but you can absolutely change up the colours to suit your own décor. More traditional Halloween colours would look just as gorgeous!
If you're looking to make Halloween a little bit cute this year and want a super easy, fun craft project, then this is a hundred percent for you!
Let’s Stay Connected
If you paint any pumpkins yourself, I would absolutely love to see what you create! Let me know in the comments what colour combinations you're thinking of for Halloween this year.
You can find me here:
Website: https://www.blinklettering.co.uk
Instagram: https://instagram.com/blinklettering
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