I’ve been painting a lot of pumpkins this year and I think it’s because I tend to carve pumpkins too early and they are rotten before Halloween.  Painting seemed like the perfect solution to avoid rotten pumpkins, and keeping the design for awhile (if you’re painting a fake one)!

Painted State Pumpkin

What you’ll need:

• Fake white pumpkin
• Acrylic paint
• Paint brush

Since I have carved an assortment of Atlanta sports related pumpkins in the past, I thought about painting something more Charleston inspired, that I could bring out each year to decorate the house.  Last year Lauren got me a pretty necklace for my birthday that I had been wearing recently and it seemed to get a lot of compliments so I decided to translate that onto a pumpkin!

The fun part about pumpkins is that they’re round.. and have grooves, which make it much harder to draw on.  I grabbed a pencil, the necklace, an image of SC online, the mini fake pumpkin from Target and starting drawing the outline of the state onto the pumpkin.  Once I was pretty happy with the outline, I painted it.

The teal took 2-3 coats for it to be a good color and not show any brush strokes.  I let the last coat dry overnight since I was started the project after dinner and decided to finish up the next day.  The final bit of painting just required me to add a heart — I tried to get it in the Charleston / Mt. Pleasant area.

Lastly, I used some twine and hot glue to wrap around the stem like I did with the color block pumpkins.  I think this gives the pumpkin a more finished look instead of the fake painted brown, but if it was a real pumpkin, I’d leave the stem alone.

Another painted pumpkin done!  And this one will be packed up after fall and should last through the years.