Gorgeous Pumpkin Patch

I love Halloween art but I don’t love that it looks outdated November 1st. When I saw these starlit pumpkins on the blog Deep Space Sparkle, I knew I had found the perfect art activity for the short lived Halloween season that could extend as a beautiful fall display.

This was a fun two day project. The highlights? The mixing of paint right on the page and the smudging of chalk pastel. The muckier one gets one’s hands, the better it seems to be!

I give full credit to the step by step instructions on Deep Space Sparkle for allowing my class to have such fun and such success with this project! Here are our step by step instructions with photographs.

Step 1: Draw pumpkins and leaves (using black oil pastel) on a large construction weight light coloured paper. Hint: draw an oval first and lines that extend from that. We had a “live” pumpkin in the room to examine for interesting stem shapes and textures and to feel the ridges.

Step 2: Students received brushes and paint colours (yellow, orange, blue) and created orange pumpkins and green leaves by mixing colours wet on wet while painting. Well, you can imagine how exciting it was to have yellow and red turn to orange and blue topped with yellow to transform into green. This was magic in the making!

Add some yellow paint . . .

Top it with red and blend into . . . orange!

Blue and yellow really do make green! And everyone got different shades 🙂

Step 3: On Day 2, cut out pumpkins and leaves and then glue to black paper.

Step 4: We handed each child a brown, green and white piece of chalk pastel. They started by colouring in the stems and adding white highlights to the pumpkin. Using the green, students drew vines and added highlights to their leaves.