Learn To Paint Fall Pumpkins

1. Fall Pumpkin Intro: Hi, everyone. I'm Krista. I have been teaching hundreds of people how to paint at my in person painting events like paint and sit parties, birthday parties, mom's night outs, and church events. Well, I have taken my family on the road to explore the country and our RV. I call myself a wandering artist, I guess. I couldn't leave my love for teaching people how to paint behind, so I set up a mobile studio to offer you my easy step by step painting instructions online. I will provide you with current to trend artwork lessons, holiday lessons, abstract lessons, and even some lessons for the kiddos, too. My instructions will have a full list of all the supplies you will need, where to find them, how to use them, and detailed instructions on each stage of the painting. I have a unique style and easy approach, and I know you will be proud to hang your artwork on the walls and not hide it in a closet. So grab your brushes and follow along, and let's go paint. 2. Fall Pumpkin Supplies: Let's just go ahead and get started for our we'll need, here's my color selection. We have antique parchment. That's just a repeat. We have Dutch aqua, classic caramel. Timeless gray, burnt umber, white, medium gray, dessert cactus, purple pans and berry wine. Using so liner. This is a three liner. 3. Fall Pumpkin Background: Today, we're going to learn how to paint this adorable fall pumpkin painting. I'm going to start by putting some white just straight on my canvas, and I'll just spread it around in a circle with my two inch flat brush. I'm just going to make sure that I'm using circular brush strokes. I'm not going in a horizontal direction or a vertical direction. I am just going in circles just to keep my paint strokes in that same circular pattern. I'm going to add a little bit of timeless gray to the outer edges of this circle, and I'm still going to keep going in that circle shape. It's really not even necessary to wash your brush out if you're going from the white to the gray. Just be sure you don't go back into the white with the gray on your brush still. You will need to rinse it at that point. So I'm just gonna keep painting this medium gray paint all the way out to the edges of my canvas and then just start to kind of blend them in here with this white. So I'm just going to keep going until all of my paint is off my brush, and then I'm going to come over here and add some medium gray paint to my palette, and I'm going to dip my brush in with both the timeless gray and the medium gray. Now, that's a lighter gray and a darker gray. They're both gonna be on my brush. And then I'm going to concentrate on painting the corners of my canvas and those outside edges. And I'm actually going to put my board underneath my painting here. Then when I paint my backgrounds, I tend to make a bit of a mess. So I'm just going to put my board under my painting so I don't get my tabletop all dirty. And then I will just keep painting my darker gray, pushing it to the outsides of the canvas here. Each time I'm getting paints, I'm adding both the medium gray and the lighter gray, which is the timeless gray in this case, to my brush and I'm just focusing and starting on the outside of the canvas and then I'm brushing my way back into the center or not really all the way to the center, but just blending it in with that other gray. A Again, I'm just going to add paint to the middle of my canvas and clean out my two inch flat brush really, really well, and then just blend that out over the grays and just make it a little more blended. I'm going to put a little bit of that medium gray or the timeless gray, which is the lighter gray back on my brush and just soften up that white and gray transition right there just a little bit. It's helpful to keep in mind here that when the paint dries, it's all going to be quite a bit darker. Acrylic paint just by nature, dries darker than you see here when it's wet, so just keep that in mind as you're painting. I am just adding a bit of the medium gray, the darker gray color to my brush and just now I'm going to soften the transition line between the grays right here. V. I am feeling pretty good about this here. Just want to bring it down just a little further. And what I'm going to do now is I'm taking some of my cream color. This is called a parchment, and I am taking this creamy color, and I'm just going to paint the bottom 2 " here, maybe 2.5 " of my canvas. And this is completely optional. You can keep painting the gray if you prefer. I just like to have this creamy parchment color. Um, on the bottom behind the pumpkins, it just kind of makes the dark red pumpkin kind of stand out a little more, but so right here, I am just blending in that green color just a little more. And again, like I said, uh, it doesn't have to be perfect. This is all gonna be pretty much covered. So we're gonna let this part dry for just a few minutes while we get ready to do our boca background. 4. Fall Pumpkin Bokeh : So now that we're ready to paint our Boca background, I'm going to take some of the cream color that I was painting the bottom with, and I'm adding a lot of water to my paint. I want it to be nice and pretty translucent. And I'm just going to make these circles by twisting my brush. And what you want here is just some nice rounded, pretty perfect circles in this translucent cream color. Just random places all across the top portion of your canvas. You can make them different sizes. It's important to make them some of them off of the page, and some light ones, more translucent ones. And you can adjust that just by adding more water or adding more paint. In order to keep this looking like it is blurred lights in the background, it's important to overlap some of your circles and making them different sizes as well. So you can see I'm putting in some small ones, and I'm overlapping some of the medium sized ones. So if you want this to look more like lights in the distance, then it's important to keep that in mind. We're going to keep going and do the same process, but with the bright white paint. Just be sure to water it down and use your smaller flat brush to make these circles, and just remember to overlap them, make them different sizes, and just keep going until you are satisfied with the Boca effect in your background. Once you're satisfied with your Boca background effect, we are going to let that dry. 5. Fall Bottom Pumpkin : And then now we're going to paint on our bottom red pumpkin. Here I'm using my six round brush and the berry wine, kind of a maroon colored paint. And I'm just painting this long s shape, kind of like a giant parentheses to make the outer ring of the pumpkin. And this is all going to be painted in Anyway, so it doesn't have to be perfect right here. I'm just putting the lines in or the ribs in for my pumpkin so that I generally know about where I want them when I start putting in my highlights. So right now, the details of it aren't perfect. I'm just putting this in so I get a feel about where my details are going to be when I'm finished. This larger oval circle is the center rib. It's the only one that you can see kind of both sides of. So we're just gonna paint it all in with a solid berry wine color, and we're just going to keep going until we get the other two ribs on the side as well. It looks like I have my pumpkin crooked, but really my paper is just kind of slanted, so I apologize. You can't see this bottom corner here. However, I do see some things that I do need to change. The bottom of this pumpkin is getting a little crooked, or maybe they're just not the right size. But it's important to realize that right now you're just doing the base layer and you can easily make any adjustments. So now I'm going to add a little bit of white to my Bry wine paint, and I'm just going to come over here and add some highlights to the outside sections of each rib. And I want to keep the darker berry wine paint as a shadow color to accent where those deep lines are in the pumpkin. So I'm just focusing on the outer edge of each ring and the highlighted area. Now, this big centerpiece, a lot of it is highlighted because it's looking right at you. So just keep in mind that if you get it to highlighted, that you can always go back in and add more of the Brry wine color for your shadows. I made one of my sections a little too pink, so I'm going to go back in and add a little bit of that dark berry wine color just to put that shadow back in there. I'm also concentrating on keeping the bottom of my pumpkin kind of a little darker than the middle or the top just because it's sitting down below and the shadows are a little darker under there. I'm lighting my paint up a little more with more white, and I'm going to add a stronger highlight to the outside of each rib. So you're just gonna keep adding highlights and putting your little lights back in there if you get too heavy handed and just keep going until you feel like you like your pumpkin. I'm going to add almost pure white for my next highlight. And I'm just adding very few sections because I don't want it to be overwhelming, but I do want it to look like a sheen on the pumpkin. So just remember the brighter your highlights get, just remember to put less and less of it there on your pumpkin. Now we're going to get ready to paint our cream colored pumpkin. This is the most difficult part of the painting for me. It's really important that you let this red pumpkin dry because if you don't, you're going to end up with a pink pumpkin on top. And I do this every time I paint this painting. I never let it dry enough, and I end up having to stop and let it dry again. So just let your pumpkin dry 6. Fall Pumpkin Top Pumpkins: Get your palette ready with some of the caramel colored paint and some of the parchment colored paint. Mix them together just to make a kind of a darker cream color. This is going to be your shadow, your darkest color, and we'll get lighter from there. Again, remember to keep in mind that your paint does dry darker. So just remember that as you're mixing your colors together. Don't make it too dark. For this pumpkin, because it's on top of the other pumpkin, I want my center ribs, the largest rib in the center to line up with the pumpkin underneath it. So I did do the center ribbon, the center rib of this pumpkin first. I am leaving the bottom of my pumpkin because I can tell that my red or the barry colored pumpkin is still a little wet. So I'm just kind of avoiding that area until those globs of paint dry. And I am moving on to my other rib of the pumpkin on the side, and I'm just kind of trying to keep it symmetrical. So I'm going from one side to the other. And I don't know if you can tell or not, but, of course, my paint was not dry down there, and my pumpkin has some red streaks in it. So we're just gonna have to let it dry a little while longer and then come back in and finish the bottom of this pumpkin that's sitting on top. I'm sitting here looking at this pumpkin and the shape of it bothers me. So I feel like it's a little short for as tall as the red pumpkin is. So I'm just gonna go back in with my cream color and just give him a little more height so that the proportions are right. And I'm gonna paint the top. I'm gonna repaint the top of this pumpkin to make it a little bigger, a little more substantial. And again, I'm still seeing some wet paint on this red pumpkin on the bottom, so we're just going to do the top and fix the bottom here in a minute. It's been a few minutes. My paint is finely dry. Both the red pumpkin and the cream pumpkin are finely dry, and I can come back in and paint the bottom of this cream colored pumpkin to finish off this section of the painting. I feel like the pumpkin is a little too light already for the base coat. So I'm just adding in some shadows with more of the caramel color to put my shadows back in there that I lost. Now that my shadows are back in there, I'm going back to my cream color, and I'm going to put back in some of my highlights on the edges of these ribs of the pumpkin, just like we did on the red pumpkin. And I'm just going to go back and forth, adding in highlights, adding back in my low lights if I overdo it. And I'm going to focus on the light coming in on the edges of the ribs of the pumpkin, keeping my shadows in there. I added a little more white to my brush, and I'm gonna come back in and put another layer of highlights on my little cream colored pumpkin here. And I'm just gonna keep going adding highlights at the top of the pumpkin and letting at the bottom of the pumpkin be a little darker. I added a little more white to my brush. Again, we're getting brighter and brighter, so I'm putting less and less highlights in certain places, just to give it a little more detail and definition. And then we'll move on to the next pumpkin. Again, just keep painting until you're satisfied. And as soon as you're satisfied, stop painting. Put the brush down. It's easy to overwork your painting. It goes from being satisfied to being ruined in just a few brush strokes. So just move on to the next. You can always add more later, take a break, come back if you need to. Just try not to overwork it because you can always finss things a little bit. Now for our third and final pumpkin on the top, I have some of the Dutch aqua on my palate and I'm using the same brush, and we're just going to paint a smaller pumpkin right on top of this cream colored pumpkin. Again, starting with the center rib of the pumpkin so that things stay nice and aligned, and you're just going to go from one side to the other balancing it out as you go until you get the size pumpkin that you're looking for. We're just using the straight Dutch aqua paint with nothing added to it. At this point, the Dutch aqua juris this really smoky blue color. And we're going to use that as our base color, our shadow color, and we'll add some of the parchment cream color as our highlight color and a little bit of white at the end. So right now, we're just focusing on the shadow color of the pumpkin. I added a little bit of the cream color to the Dutch aqua color, and it creates this sort of a soft green color only because the cream color has a little tint of yellow to it. If you don't like that color, you can use the white to add to your Dutch aqua instead of the cream color that you get a light blue instead of this greenish blue. But I like this green blue. It's one of my favorite colors. But again, that's totally your preference. You can use the white if you think that that looks better. As I'm adding more highlights to this little blue pumpkin, I am moving on to the white just because I want it to be a little brighter than that cream color. Just like we did with the other two pumpkins, I'm adding more and more white to my brush and just adding it in smaller spaces as it gets brighter and brighter. And I did overdo it a little bit right here in the center, so I'll just add a little more blue to tan that down a little bit. And again, you just keep going until you are satisfied with your pumpkin and let it dry. And you can always fix any parts that you don't like once you look at it dry and are satisfied with your painting. Now, I've let my pumpkins dry for just a few minutes, and we're going to work on our stem for the top blue pumpkin, and we're going to focus on painting the twigs here in just a minute. So for the stem, we're just going to trace out the top of the pumpkin in just a little brown, kind of a blob thing on top. And you will just bring up the stem in any direction that you want and just give it a little curve and just create a stem there just like. Go ahead and paint that in with your solid brown color. Just make him nice and brown. I added a little bit of cream to my brown color just to put some highlights on the stem here, focusing on kind of like one side. Like the light was coming in at one side. And you can pick which side that is for you. I put a little on the arch and a little on the end of the stem. 7. Fall Pumpkin Twigs : And we're going to focus down here on the bottom of our painting, and I'm going to use my reference photo from the first painting I practiced on, and I will just start here at the bottom with my thin liner brush, and I'm just going in with my solid brown color, and I'm making these random twigs with very light pressure. Some sections have light pressure, some sections have heavier pressure. I can put in some loops every once in a while if I choose to. Some of the twigs are going to go off the page. You just want this to be a very organic, not too rigid. You can have shaky hands while you do this. I always like doing twigs because I do have shaky hands. This part to me is just very forgiving. As long as you don't try to make them too matching or too many of them also can be bad. It's easy to put too many. You just kind of have to take a break and step away from the painting and look from different angles, try turning your painting, maybe walk into the next room and come back. As long as you have that kind of a relaxed approach, you'll be able to tell when you've put enough and see maybe where you need a little bit more. I like to have some of the twigs overlapping sections of the pumpkins. I like to have one or two twigs on each side maybe reaching into the cream colored pumpkin. You certainly don't have to do it this way. I just feel like the contrast between the cream and the dark brown is nice. Just as long as you vary up your twigs and just remember that it doesn't have to be perfect, you'll do great. Turning your canvas in this way can also help you try to keep the twigs in a really random and organic pattern here. And also, it can keep you from putting your hand in a lot of wet paint as you walk on certain sections of the painting. I think I about put where I might need to turn my painting back around and just take a look and see what I need to add on this side. Now, to be honest with you, I don't know why I just went around that circle, that Boca circle that's in the background. And I'm noticing that I'm trying to miss all of them. I don't know why I did that. I think it would look better and maybe more natural if I had some of those twigs going in front of the Boca. So maybe don't do what I just did, but it's okay for me, I guess. It doesn't really bother me that bad. I just can't believe I just kind of subconsciously went completely around around that circle. So I just think that's kind of funny. I'm adding just a small little curly twig vine twig to my stem here on the top of my pumpkin. Now what I'm doing is adding a little bit of that caramel mixture to my brown paint, and I'm going to take my same liner brush and just go over portions of these twigs to give them some highlights, maybe around the loops and on certain sections of where the light might be hitting them. I'm not trying to cover the whole entire twig. I'm just picking some random sections to have some highlights to give the vines and twigs some dimension and interest. Oh. Again, I'm just gonna flip my canvas over here to work on the other side so that I don't put my hand in my paint. I'm just leaning back and looking at the paintings, seeing if there are any kind of boring places that twigs that might look a little flat. I'm satisfied with my twigs. I'm going to rinse out my brush really well, and we're going to move on to the green leaves. 8. Fall Pumpkins Final Leaves: I'm going to get my number six round brush back again, clean it off really well, and we're going to use the desert green paint that we have here to paint some leaves at the bottom of our canvas that are going to kind of be hidden behind the twigs. So I'm just making sure my brush here is really clean, and we're going to go in with this green paint. I'm not going to put a lot of leaves. There's probably going to be about four or five leaves on each side of the pumpkin. So I'm just gonna pick just some places and just paint a very slender, kind of a parentheses motion here with my paint brush. And I use the very tip of my brush for the stem. And as I'm making the leaves, I press down on my brush to get a thicker line and with more pressure that creates that thick line. So thin lines, thin pressure. If you want thick lines, press harder with your brush, and you'll get that nice rounded leaf shape. Remember to turn your canvas as you want different angles for your leaves. And don't worry too much that I'm painting over my vine lines. We're gonna go back in and put those back on top, just so some of them are in front of the leaves and some of them are behind the leaves. After my one little leaf there on the bottom, we'll switch over and work on this side of the leaves. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Just deciding where I want this other leaf to be. Right there. We'll go off the page. The good thing about doing these leaves is sometimes you have ugly twigs or ugly loops, when you can just paint a leaf right over it, and no one will ever know what was there. I will put this leaf here on the bottom, just so this one has a bottom leaf, too, and I think that is good on the leaves, and we'll work on putting some white into our green color so that we can have a highlight color for these leaves. I'm just mixing in some white and cream, and I'm going to just put some highlights on these leaves. And if you put too many highlights, you can always go back in with your original green colour and just soften it up a little bit. Notice, I'm not covering the entire leaf. I'm leaving some of that green, the darker green color behind there. I just want some definition. I don't want to completely change the color of the leaves. I added a little more white just to get these leaves up here a little more brightness, and I think I overdid it a little bit. So I'm just gonna go back in and cover that up just a little bit, mix it in, get a little more blended. So just keep working on these highlights until you get it just the way you're satisfied with it. Again, it's easy to overwork them. So just keep adding a little bit more and a little bit more and going back in with your low lights. Just being careful not to overwork them. You can step back, take a look at your work, and see if there's anything that you want to change. You can pick it up, keep it at arm's length. And we are almost done. The next thing we're gonna do is just go back in with our liner brush into the straight brown again and just put in our twigs that we painted over that we perhaps maybe want to put some of those twigs back over the leaves so that some of them are in front of the leaves and some of them are behind. It just gives a little more depth and interest. Just remember here, we're not doing every twig that we painted over. We're just going to pick a few on each side. As you are repainting your twigs, don't forget to repaint in your highlights on those twigs, as well. I'm going to come over to this side of the pumpkin and pick a few of the vines and twigs that I want to repaint over these leaves. I am super satisfied with my twigs and my leaves, and now I'm going to put some purple on my palette and mix it in with some white to make a light purple. And we're gonna paint in some so I'm mixing in some white with my purple until I get a shade of purple that I feel like goes well with the painting, and I'm just going to take my number six round brush and just paint in some circles, some really small berry type circles. You can use the end of your paint brush, too. I just like to use the very tip of my brush. I'm really not even pressing down with my brush. I am just painting in some random places in odd numbers, some circles for some berries in between some of the blank spots that I have on my painting. I'm going to flip my painting over just because I don't want to touch that wet paint and do the same thing to the other side. I'm going to go even a little further and put some purple berries on top of the bottom of my pumpkin, if that makes sense. And just to show you how you can use the back of your brush for some other dots, I'll just put some white ones in here just a few just to show you that you can use the other end of your brush for some effects as well. So this is about where I'm going to stop putting berries because it can get a little overwhelming. And again, less is more here. You can always add more later if you feel like you need to, but it's more difficult to take them away. So we're going to call this painting finished, and I hope you guys really enjoyed it, and we will see you and paint together again next time.