Sport Inspired Pumpkins
An easy way to decorate pumpkins for Halloween is to paint them. You can make your pumpkins as simple, or as elaborate, as you’d like.
After my heroic efforts last year in making a BB-8 pumpkin, I wanted to keep it simple this year. I also wanted my son to help. For the love of Pete, just help Mom!! 🙂
We came up with the idea to paint pumpkins to look like a ball from several sports. There are so many possibilities, but we narrowed it down to 4 sports and 4 pumpkins.
Designing Your Pumpkin
01. Choose pumpkins that will work for the ball shape and color you are trying to achieve. You can buy white pumpkins for a ball that you would paint a lighter color, such as white. An orange pumpkin will work fine for the most part, you just may need to do a few more coats of paint to cover the orange in some cases.
02. Choose a pumpkin size that will work for the larger design idea. We chose bigger pumpkins for the basketball and football, and smaller pumpkins for the baseball and the tennis ball. Our football pumpkin was taller and narrower, to imitate the shape of a football. Our other pumpkins were more round in shape.
03. Clean your pumpkins off. You want to start with a clean surface so that the paint will work better on the pumpkin.
04. Choose your paints. I use acrylic paints. I’ve gotten mine at Michael’s, Hobby Lobby, even Wal-Mart. They are inexpensive, so that you can choose lots of different colors. Beware though, acrylic paint will not stand up to getting rained on. If you plan to display your pumpkins outside, like we do, make sure your weather will cooperate. If it is going to rain, get your pumpkins out of the rain. If we have fair weather here, I put our pumpkins out the week of Halloween. Otherwise, I will just put them out on Halloween. The rest of the time, they look great decorating our kitchen!
05. Choose your design. There are many possibilities with a ball from pretty much any sport. My son chose 4 sports for us. You can do whichever you’d like. We free-handed everything, because my son was helping and I wanted it to be fun and “kid-perfect.” Not “Mommy spent hours researching templates and did all the work” perfect! Although, feel free to research templates and measure everything exactly for a more polished look.
06. Have fun! We kept our pumpkins simple. But, you could add brand logos, or other details like that.
**Pumpkin FAIL!! My son chose a golf ball at first. I tried to talk him out of it, but he was insistent. It was a total fail! Doing a golf ball design anywhere is very challenging, let alone on a pumpkin. It is very difficult to get the concave dimples on a golf ball just right. Ours ended up looking like a white sphere with a gray pox virus. TOTAL FAIL! I overruled my son, and we repainted our sad golf ball to look like a tennis ball.
Happy pumpkin painting! Painted your pumpkin this year? Share a photo in our comments or tag @amommentarylife on instagram
–Mellie
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