How to Make an Easy Floral Painted Pumpkin

If you have been searching for some Pumpkin Painting Ideas, look no further than this post! It is definitely Pumpkin Painting Season, and I am here to share with you how to paint the most gorgeous Floral Painted Pumpkins without a lot of artistic know-how.

If you are new here, then you should know I love nothing more than making over old stuff or making plain stuff pretty. Usually, my medium of choice is an old piece of furniture, cabinet door, or something found, and my favorite DIY Paint and IOD furniture and decor enhancements.

When it comes time for holiday decor, I love to decorate my home and share it with friends. Sometimes the Pumpkins you get from your local grocery store, or ones straight from the Pumpkin Patch have a lot of dirt, or even a coating of wax on them to make them shiny. Either way, you will have to prep your pumpkins before you can paint them well. The other problem with using a fresh pumpkin is that you cannot put it away and take it out to display next year. That would be gross!

My solution is to use either a Foam Pumpkin you can find at any craft store, or in my case, a Paper Mache pumpkin. You can purchase them from Amazon HERE, or find one at your local craft store. Neither my local Hobby Lobby nor Michaels had what I was looking for, so Amazon it was.

Floral Painting Pumpkins Supplies

Time to gather supplies, I decided to make a Pumpkin Painting Party and invited friends over from my local Vintage Co-op to Paint Pumpkins. If you are interested in finding out more about in-person or online workshops, you can find out more at this link: HERE.

To help everyone get ideas for decorated pumpkins, I put out several colors of DIY Paint and scraps from several different IOD Transfers that had floral themes to them.

We used the Paper Mache Pumpkins I had, they were so easy to paint, and because the DIY Paint we used is a Clay Based Paint with only 9 ingredients, no acrylic, latex, or silicone, it dried so fast and we had so much fun blending different colors. You can easily blend DIY Paint with a continuous water mister and a brush, if you haven’t tried this, it’s kind of addicting. When we blended the Paint on the Pumpkins, it really gave them a much more realistic look as Cinderella Pumpkins or Fairy Tale Pumpkins are beautiful with their variegated colors.

Once we had our Pumpkins painted the way we wanted, we made sure the DIY Paint was totally dry, and we used a heat gun to set it., this one is by far my favorite, I used it almost daily. The IOD Transfers will have a hard time sticking to any surface if your surface, paint, etc. is not totally clean and dry.

How to Paint Floral Pumpkins

The best thing about IOD Transfers is that they are micro-thin and stick so well to any dry surface. IOD makes the best quality transfers I have ever seen, hands down. Sometimes you actually have to touch the surface of something with an IOD transfer to tell if it was painted or not, the brush strokes, the details, they are amazing. I can’t tell you how many times I have made over old junk and someone will ask me if I hand painted the floral scene on. Nope! It’s always an IOD Transfer!

This Dresser I did last Fall in Painterly Floras and DIY Paint was one of my favorite projects ever, it really does look like I painted those Sunflowers by hand!

All IOD transfers come in sheets where you can create an entire scene with them, or you can mix and match, and cut them out. They all have gridded paper so it makes cutting and lining up super easy as well.

For these Floral Painted Pumpkins, we used Botanist’s Journal, Millot’s, Painterly Floras, and Flora Parisiensis.

Cute Pumpkin Painting Ideas

I love teaching others to make their old things gorgeous again, give things new life, or create a fun craft project for any holiday or decor. One of the things I love most about teaching is how much I always learn from my students. My students always have the best ideas and I always learn something new as everyone has a different approach to decorating.

Each student had a different approach to their own cute pumpkin painting. And they all turned out so cute and so fun. It was hard to say which one we liked the most because everyone had their own interpretation of a Cute Painted Pumpkin.

I hope I inspired you with enough ideas to go paint your pumpkins! If you like this post, I would love a comment to let me know and share on Pinterest! It helps other people find my blog and helps me reach further to inspire others to makeover their old stuff. Which is what I am here to do 🙂