Disney inspired pumpkins

I get a lot of special requests for characters on pumpkins, and folks love Disney!

Winnie-the Pooh is going out trick-or-treating dressed as a bee. You can't see it in this picture, but Pooh is wearing a cap that has bee antennae on it! This was a really cute one:

Pooh Bear

Mickey Mouse is going out trick-or-treating too, dressed up in his best ghost costume:

Tinkerbell is always a favorite character of the Disney crowd. The first Tinkerbell pumpkin was a huge one so I had a lot of room to paint. She got lots of glitter on her wings and her green dress. The second Tink is dressed like a witch, and riding a broom sidesaddle like the animated Samantha on the beginning of the old Bewitched tv show:

Bewitched Tink

Jack and Sally from the Nightmare Before Christmas are SUPER popular. I think I painted them 7 or 8 times at least last year. They were a big seller for sure!

Large Jack & Sally Pumpkin

Small J & S

Jack's ghost dog Zero was a great design too:

The popularity of Pirates, spurred on by The Pirates of the Caribbean movies, made the old skull & crossbones popular:
This is the back side of a smaller skull & crossbones pirate pumpkin. I liked including the parchment scroll warning that "Dead Men Tell No Tales"

I am planning on painting more Disney character inspired pumpkins this year. I'd like to do Lock, Shock & Barrel from Nightmare Before Christmas, maybe Oogie Boogie too, he's creepy! I'm sure we'll see more of Jack , Sally, & Zero.

Maybe we'll see Mickey in his sorcerer's apprentice outfit, or Minnie Mouse dressed to go out trick-or-treating. If anyone has any ideas for Disney pumpkins, I'd love to hear them!

How I started painting pumpkins

A couple of years ago I saw some really basic painted pumpkins, and I thought, I can do that! I am a professional face painter so I already had some experience painting on a rounded surface.

At the time I had a small nephew who was OBSESSED with pumpkins. I'm not kidding. He wanted to look at google search pictures of them, he talked about them all the time, he even had a small sugar pumpkin that he took in his crib with him when he went to sleep. It was really cute, actually. One of my first painted pumpkins was a jack o' lantern face for him. I did it with acrylic paint and put an clear acrylic spray sealer on it once it was dry. So cute, don't you think?

Isaac's pumpkin

He was pretty excited when he got it!

Lots of traditional Halloween designs make great subject matter for pumpkin paintings. Witches, both cute and sexy style:

I love this little blue ghost:

And these "Boo" ghosts as well!

I tried some purple bats flying across the full moon:

In addition to the paint, I have made liberal use of glitter glue on most of these designs. It's difficult to tell from the pictures but most of these pumpkins have a sparkly coating on them that adds another dimension to the painting.

It's tough to take pictures of the pumpkin paintings at all! The rounded surface of the pumpkin make it difficult to near impossible to show the whole design on any of these pumpkins. Half of the painting is curved away from the camera lens, and not in the picture at all darn it.

Don't you love pumpkins?

Ah, pumpkins! They're adorable, aren't they? When they start showing up on store shelves you know Halloween isn't far behind. When pumpkin flavored treats start appearing on menus, even better!

Shakespeare mentioned pumpkins in his play The Merry Wives of Windsor. Pumpkins make an appearance in the fairy tale Cinderella, and Washington Irving's spooky story of early American fright The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Pumpkins were eaten by Native American peoples. The early English-American colonists ate them too, even baking cleaned pumpkins filled with milk, honey, and spices in hot coals. Pumpkin pie baked right inside the pumpkin shell! Peter Peter, Pumpkin Eater had nothing on those clever cooks.

Personally, I love pumpkins. They signal the coming of fall, my favorite season. I never liked the start of school as a kid, but I could deal with it because I knew that soon the night air would start getting crisp. The fall colors would start creeping into the foliage of my mother's beloved garden, the magenta and yellow and purple and orange chrysanthemums bursting out in bloom just as the summer flowers wound down for a winter nap.

And of course, pumpkins mean Halloween. What is Halloween without a bunch of jack o' lanterns grinning into the dark night as trick-or-treater make their merry rounds?