Fearless Friday, Fanciful Pumpkins

the Painted Apron

5 years ago

Have you seen the new fall MacKenzie-Childs pumpkins?

Aren’t they fun??

Let’s make some of our own!

Step 1: Plan!

I made a couple of photo reference pages to refer to while painting

For the orange pumpkin I decided on white hydrangeas and pink roses

This page also has a photo of the inspiration photo for the aqua dried flower and ribbon topped gilded pumpkin

The second page has a photo of the MKC mixed pattern pumpkin along with large pink blooms and black eyed Susans that I decided to paint on mine

I found a glossy ceramic white pumpkin with black checks at Hobby Lobby, perfect!

I also got a faux orange and aqua/green pumpkin

At 40% off, wow, these are way more affordable than the pricey MacKenzie Childs pumpkins!

{please forgive my messy desk, I promised myself I would clean it up this weekend!}

Step 2

Do a practice sketch or painting page, to plan out your design and practice strokes, colors

I started with painting petals on 2 opposing white parts of the glossy pumpkin with yellow gloss enamel acrylic paint and a touch of brown

Then I painted the center with a dab of black applied with a small round brush

The stems and leaves were added with a mix of green and yellow with a thin liner brush

The other 2 sections were painted with an abstract rose design in pink and orange

To finish I added some black dots to the pink rose sections and orange dots to the stem

For the faux orange pumpkin I started with the hydrangea blooms. Basically load a fat round brush with white and a tiny touch of yellow and green and apply the paint with quick dabs

You can see a tutorial for painting hydrangeas here

Then add leaves and large pink abstract roses

To finish this pumpkin I gave it some black dots

and a checked ribbon with a berry spray

The final pumpkin got a topper of ribbon, copper leaves, a sunflower, a large rust colored hydrangea bloom and berries

Once the topper was in place I added some gold leaf in the crevices

Follow the directions on the gold leaf package, I do gold leaf in an unconventional way so I don’t want to teach you my bad habits! But I will tell you that I use Mod Podge to apply it and it works fine for me…