Today I have something special for you all! A Night Sky Halloween Fall Watercolor Pumpkin.

Cold weather please be here already. This girl is so ready for fall. My life has been absolutely crazy this past month… I’ll write more on that later, but between our pending move I decided to do a bunch of fall projects for our house before we pack it all up. The project I’m going to share with you guys today is one that I’ve had floating around in my head for forever: A Midnight Sky Watercolor Pumpkin. Perfect for fall, right? I may just have to do a series of pumpkins in this style. I had never even thought about how to paint a pumpkin before this DIY. But now I am obsessed with it’s endless possibilities!

So the first step for this process is painting a plastic pumpkin with a good primer paint for your watercolors to adhere to. I used Amy Howard’s One Step paint in white.

Once the paint has dried, go ahead and put your pumpkin on a plate & start adding a mix of blues and greens for the background of your piece.

It will look very streaky at first… but we will be adding multiple layers, so don’t worry too much. Just get some paint on there.

Here’s the first layer of paint complete.

Next dry that pumpkin with a hair blow dryer. I like for my layers to be fully dry between steps.

Onto the next layer of paint. Once you’ve covered it to your liking, just put that hair dryer back on it.

At this point I started using thicker paint. Then I dried it & ragged off any streaks that I didn’t like. That’s the issue with not painting on absorbent paper… plastic can only handle so much watercolor, which is why using a “thirsty” primer is so important.

I did rub the paint streaks out before adding my watercolor trees and sky details.

Once the pumpkin is dry, you can start adding trees & foliage.

I used a mix of green & black for all my branches. It just needs to be dark enough to pop against the already dark background.

If you want some sparkle effect, you can add stars.

I also added two moons, one large and one small one on each side of the pumpkin so that I can rotate it according to the landscape scene I want.

Here’s the larger of the two moons I painted. Once you are done painting it, you will want to seal your pumpkin with something so that it doesn’t rub off, or get runny when touched with water. A couple ideas would be a clear wax, clear spray paint, or Mod Podge.

And here is the other side of the pumpkin finished.

I think the larger moon version is my favorite, but I am seriously planning on doing more versions of nigh sky pumpkins in the future.