Elvish Witch

Hello Halloween 2010!

My first pumpkins of 2010 are done, and I love how this adorable elvish witch came out. Does she look a little like actress Anne Hathaway to you? I swear to you I'm not obsessed with celebrities. I have no idea why some of my characters turn out looking like famous people.

I am digging her serene smile and her pointy ears. I wish I had pointy ears. Too cute!

This is a REALLY big, heavy pumpkin. I hope it finds a good home with some one who will like her and her black kitten as much as I do.

Masquerade

Look who's ready for the masquerade ball! I love fairies, don't you? The Fair Folk are a fun subject to paint.

I adore this design! The fairy is winsome, her hair is wild, and her mask is lovely. What's not to like? Again, I was hoping to keep this one and enjoy it all autumn, but alas, this pumpkin was bought toot sweet (that's pumpkin-painter talk for "pretty darn quick") and went home with a farmers market shopper. I'm sure they'll be very happy together. Maybe I'll paint myself another one...

I decided to decorate the fairy's mask with red and orange fall leaves and white birch twigs. I thought the colors stood out nicely in front of her dark hair. I used metallic gold paint for her wings and mask which took quite a few coats to get good coverage and shine, but I think it was worth the extra painting and drying-between-coats time.

Today is the day after Halloween and I am planning on buying a few more pumpkins today so I can do some more fall theme designs for my portfolio. I can't imagine that I'll sell any, but I'll be happy to gift my family and friends with autumn/thanksgiving painted pumpkins for their yards or dinner tables.

Also stay tuned for a step-by-step tutorial on where I get my inspiration, how I paint my designs, what products I use, etc...

Hello Kitty - the dark side

How adorable is Hello Kitty as a little devil? I bought some Hello Kitty stickers that had her dressed in different Halloween costumes and I thought this picture was perfect for a small pumpkin. Hello Kitty pumpkin found a happy home with a little girl and her Mom who are both Hello Kitty collectors. Nice.

Which Witch?

I'm beginning to think that 2009 will be remembered as my year of the witch! I can't help it, I love painting them! This lovely magical girl looks a little like Angelina Jolie, don't you think?

Once again, thanks to the inspiration of Molly Harrison and her wicca art.

A very happy customer went home with this special (and large! must have weighed 12 lbs at least!) pumpkin at the We Love Long Beach pancake breakfast last Saturday morning. The We Love Long Beach folks are nice enough to let me show up and face paint at their community events, and it's a lot of fun for me to connect with families in my own home town. I grew up in Long Beach Ca and I think it's still one of the most beautiful coastal cities in southern. California.

I have more witches in store for 2009, keep your eye out for future blog posts and pics.

Enchanting

This lovely witch is an homage to one of my favorite fantasy artists Molly Harrison. I have her "pagan" calendar and I love her style! She also paints mermaids, fairies, dragons, cats, and many other fantastical beings. Thanks for all the inspiration, Molly.

I like the way the colors on this all work together. I like the way her hat pops up out of the frame. I like the way her hair turned out: I added both low lights and highlights to the basic hair color which gave it a lot of dimension. I also tried a new technique on the moon: I painted the white circle first, and once that was dry I put a wash of watered down paint on top in both a light blue and a grey. The pink background is also done with a watered down color wash. I wanted the background to kind of recede so I tried to do a very soft color behind the subject.

All in all, I'm very happy with the way this witch turned out. Now if only I could get my hair color to be that pretty and dimensional...

Love in the Graveyard

Here is another example of a silhouette design. Two black cats are sitting in the grave yard, their tails curled up and over and entwined to form a heart. How sweet is that? Above them in the night sky are some heart shaped bats and spooky tree branches, and a grinning Jack o' Lantern gives them a knowing smile from the side of the scene. It just goes to show that it's not where you are, it's who you're with that makes all the difference in the world. Ah, love!

This pumpkin actually photographed beautifully. The colors in the camera flash look gorgeous! Again, some of the details around the edges are lost, like a headstone and the cemetery fencing, but what are you gong to do? It happens when you try to take a 2 D image of a 3 D object.

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?