I am not much of a pumpkin carver. When I was little the idea scared me, as I didn’t want to be near a knife or any sort of sharp object. So I never really had the experience of carving a pumpkin myself.
Because of this, I decided to take a different approach when decorating a pumpkin each year – instead of carving, I would paint it! I also decided to use fake pumpkins so I could keep them and add to my collection by making a new one each year. And of course as a Disney fan, I knew I had to paint my pumpkins in the style of Disney!
But I’m not actually the most artistic person out there. I can copy things decently, but anything with detail wasn’t going to work. That’s when I came up with the idea of doing silhouettes of scenes from Disney movies. It’s actually worked really well so far, and this is my fourth year doing it. I now have a collection of 4 painted Disney pumpkins, which represents my four favorite Disney movies!
If you’re curious about how I do it, the process is pretty simple. I do a google search for the movie I want to do + silhouette. There are usually some good options to choose from. If there aren’t any I like then I do a regular image search and try to imagine just the outline of one of those images. Then, I use a pencil to draw the design onto my pumpkin (before I paint it). That way I can adjust things if I need to.
Then I just paint the image – since it’s a silhouette I don’t need to do any detail work, I can just color it in black. I try not to make it too boring though so I attempt to find places to add some hints of color as well! Here is this year’s work:
The final thing I do is put the title of the movie on the back of each pumpkin. I pull up the movie poster and try my best to imitate the font used! While I do all of this freehand, I’m sure you could pretty easily trace it if that sounds easier to you.
Do you decorate pumpkins in any way? And which Disney movie do you think I should tackle next year?
