{My Favorite Bloggers: Pumpkin Canvas Art}

Hey, y'all!  I'm sorry that I'm not posting as much as I was during the summer, but I'm sure you can understand that school has me a lot busier than I was then.  Anyway, I'm here today to share a pumpkin project with you as part of My Favorite Bloggers' Monthly Themed Post.

Let me introduce you to everyone participating. Starting at the top, left to right: 

Kirsten from One Tough Mother, Adrianne from Happy Hour Projects, Marilyn from 4 You With Love, Sky from Capital B, Tara from Suburble, Bethany from Pitter and Glink, Melanie from It Happens in a Blink, Lauren from The Thinking Closet, Kara from Petals and Picots, Carlee from Ladybird Ln, ChiWei from 1 Dog Woof, Kadie from 7 Alive, Amy from One Artsy Mama, Sarah from Repeat Crafter Me and Nancy from Small Things with Love. 

These ladies and I have each come up with a pumpkin themed project or recipe.

So without further ado, here's my project.

All you need to complete this project is a canvas, paint, a paint brush, and a brown ink pad (optional).  I started by sketching a pumpkin with a pencil on my canvas.

I should have painted the background of my canvas first, but I was so excited to start painting my pumpkin, I forgot!  So you should paint your background first and THEN sketch your pumpkin.  After your pumpkin is sketched, you need to fill in the design with the appropriate colors.

In this picture, I have painted the background, the pumpkin stem, and, of course, the pumpkin.  The trick to making the pumpkin look somewhat realistic is by shading.  Shading when painting is really fun, and it's not that difficult to do.  I shaded the pumpkin by painting the base of the pumpkin orange, and while it was still wet, I used a small brush loaded with a little bit of brown paint to paint the lines in my pumpkin.  Then I brushed over the brown paint with the brush I used to apply the orange paint.  I didn't load any extra orange paint on the brush; I simply used what was left over on the brush to blend the brown paint into the orange paint.  As long as you add different color paint while the base paint is still wet, you can easily blend the colors to create a nicely shaded pumpkin.  (You can even add white or tan paint and blend it in to create highlights.)

In the above photo, you can see a bit of shading that I added to the stem of the pumpkin.  Later I painted the leaf and curly vines and shaded those as well.

When I finished painting, the background of the canvas was a bit too "clean" for me, so I decided to lightly rub my brown distress ink pad over the canvas.  I blended the ink in with a damp foam brush, and once I had enough of the distressed look for my taste, I was finished with my pumpkin canvas.

I love everything this pumpkin art represents: cooler weather, fun holidays, and time spent with family and friends.

If I can create pumpkin art, you can too.  Give it a try, and you'll find that it's not as hard as you may think.  And you know what else you might want to try?  Any of the other pumpkin projects or recipes from my favorite bloggers, so hop on over to my friends' blogs to see their awesome projects.