Fall Holiday Pumpkins Project

Wanted to share with you my finished fall holiday pumpkins project. This one took me a while. I have had a lot of distractions. But it gave me a lot of time to think about my process.

I mentioned this project in a few previous posts. These were my inspiration. And here you can see the pumpkins mid-process. I took four of those dollar store carvable pumpkins, spray painted them with two coats of high gloss metallic paint. Had I been able to find "Looking Glass" paint I would've used that.

I read some suggestions for this kind of DIY and realized I skipped the suggestion to spray paint these white first. I think that would've helped a lot. Another thing I wish I'd done was give them three coats of silver spray paint. I rubbed the paint a bit thin later on in the process.

So after they were all shiny, they were a little too shiny. So I decided to try to age them a little bit with black craft paint. I was a little torn between using a dry brush method or using a rag dipped in paint. In the end I went with a two-step process, dry brush first and then rubbing the paint into crevices while rubbing most of it off. My first attempt I realized I went a little too far with the black paint.

I wanted them slightly aged, but the pumpkin on the right looked like something that had been used as a prop of the Disneyland haunted mansion since 1950. A little too-o-o-o aged. So I took a damp cloth to it and rubbed off a lot more of the black paint.

The final product you can see at the top of this post are perfectly aged for my liking. The black paint gave them a lot more dimension and helped hide the blatant fact that they are cheap spray painted foam pumpkins from the dollar store. I certainly could not fool anyone into thinking these are the luxurious and beautiful Pottery Barn Mercury Glass Pumpkins, but for my simple world, these will do.

As you may recall, I have a lifetime supply of glitter. I would like to do some glitter experimentation with a few more of these pumpkins. Fall and winter are the perfect shiny bling seasons and I'm all for a little sparkle in the right controlled environment, haa-haa. Maybe I'll pick up a few more pumpkins to play around with in the next few weeks.

images by kalanicut