Pumpkin Painting and Carving Ideas
Fall is our favorite time of year! Each time when the weather cools down we can’t wait to pull out the decorations and make our homes cozy for the season. And of course, one of our favorite things about fall is Halloween! Each year our Halloween collections get more fun, more ‘glow in the dark’, and cuter!
Just check out our newest Halloween Collection which is out NOW! We have more prints, great fall styles and your glow in the dark favorites are back again. Nothing says Halloween like these cute new collections.
One thing we always love about Halloween is pumpkins – but carving pumpkins with your birdies can be such a pain. It always makes a mess and ends up being a bigger job for YOU, since too many sharp tools are involved for children.
So as much as we loved carved pumpkins, we wanted to bring you some inspiration to paint pumpkins with your kids this year. Plus, we’ve rounded up the internet’s best tricks to carving pumpkins just for you!
The best thing about painting pumpkins is that you can allow your kids to let their imaginations run wild and their personalities shine.
Pro tip: before painting your pumpkins, wash them down with warm soapy water and dry them completely.
Pumpkin Painting Ideas for Kids
Finger Painted Mini Pumpkins
If it’s still nice outside, we recommend heading outside, setting up the paints and letting your little birdies finger paint their pumpkins. This can turn into such a good sensory activity for younger kids and finger painting is always a great way for kids to express their creativity. If you want a really easy fall activity for the whole family, consider finger painted mini-pumpkins.
Glitter Pumpkins
If you’re not afraid of a mess, give glitter pumpkins a try! Once again, we’d recommend using mini pumpkins for this activity. You can cover a pumpkin with glue and let your toddlers go crazy with the glitter. It’s definitely an activity that you want to do outside, unless you want to be vacuuming up glitter until next fall!
But the pumpkin is going to turn out so cute. Just look at how they went for our friends over at Tot Schooling.
Painted Monster Pumpkins
Aubree from Aubree’s Originals has put together the best guide for painting monster pumpkins. This is definitely an activity that you can do with slightly older kids and the results are just adorable. Aubree walks you through how to paint a ghost, frankenstein monster, vampire, witch and zombie! So there’s really a monster there for everyone!
Follow along her super easy instructions here.
Handprint Pumpkins
We’ve shared before how much we love creating handprint art with our birdies. It’s such a special way to memorialize how sweet and small they are. While you can’t keep pumpkins all year round (because they will rot), we still loved this way of bringing ghosts and spiders to life through handprints!
However, if this is something you’d like to keep for years to come, we’d recommend using craft pumpkins that you can easily get from any craft store this time of year! That way you simply have to pull out your handprint pumpkins for years to come.
Follow along the easy instructions here.
Skeleton Pumpkins
If you’re feeling really creative this year, we love this design from Good Housekeeping! You’ll need a couple of pumpkins and a steady hand, but we think this design is just gorgeous. Maybe this can be your project while the little kids finger paint!
Rainbow Pumpkins
Another fun and easy pumpkin painting idea for kids would be rainbow pumpkins! Grab some mini pumpkins and paint in all colors of the rainbow and set out to paint each pumpkin a different color. We love how cute rainbow pumpkins will look altogether when you’ve painted each one.
If you’re feeling really creative, or you have older kids, you can paint each pumpkin into a rainbow – but trust us! With little kids this is going to make an even bigger mess, so we recommend painting each pumpkin one color.
Sticker Pumpkins
Maybe you’d like to avoid the mess altogether! A great option for kids who love sticks and moms who love a mess free activity is to decorate your pumpkins with stickers. You can get themed stickers based on your kids favorite shows or you can get fall themed stickers for the season. Either way, for kids who love stickers – this activity is going to be a real winner!
If you’re leaning more towards painting pumpkins, for little kids we’d recommend mini pumpkins! Trust us, it’s a more manageable project when the pumpkins are smaller! However, if you’re going to be carving pumpkins this year, you’ll want to get big pumpkins from the local pumpkin patch! And if you are determined to carve pumpkins this year, we wanted to share some tips with you.
Pumpkin Carving Tips
- To prevent making a mess, we always recommend lining your carving surface with old newspapers.
- Put a bowl off to the side to collect your slimy pumpkin guts.
- Separate the seeds and save them for toasting later! (Toasted pumpkin seeds are the ultimate fall treat!)
- Use a long X-acto knife or serrated knife to ensure the cleanest lines.
- If you’re carving pumpkins with your children, you can give them the job of drawing their design on the pumpkin and pulling out the guts.
- For an endless list of pumpkin carving inspiration, read this post!
There you have it! Our best pumpkin painting activities for kids. If you want to read our full fall bucket list for families, you can find that here. And if you’re ready to shop cute Halloween styles from Birdie Bean, we recommend heading HERE. Our Halloween collections always sell out fast! So make sure to get your favorites today!
