Painting Pumpkins

One of my favorite art projects to do with Kindergarten students is a pumpkin painting project.

I love this project because all kids can be successful.  I don't claim to be an artist, but by seeing things in shapes and drawing those shapes one at a time I'm able to make my chicken-scratch-drawing actually look like a real artist might.  If I can do it, anyone can!  

We started this project by playing around with oil pastels.  It's a new medium for many kids and the texture is a bit different than regular crayons.  I let the kids draw anything they wanted and then encouraged them to draw skinny lines and fat lines, just to experience the pastels.  Then, we moved on to the pumpkin lesson.  We looked at real pumpkins and talked about the ribs, or lines, on the pumpkins.  We started our drawing with an oval (after a little practicing with drawing ovals in the air).  After that, we drew the ribs of the pumpkin along side of the oval.  After adding a stem and some leaves on the side, we were ready to paint.

The painting is the fun part because we break all of the rules!  Up to this point, we've used mostly water colors.  I tell the kids to BE SURE to wash their brushes before changing colors and remind them not to mix the paints because it will turn our paint trays into a muddy mess.  Well, in this project, the kids need to create their own shades of orange.  We use red, yellow, and orange paint and mix them all together.  Kids load up their brushes with two different colors and paint away!

I can't wait to have the kids cut these out, add their leaves, and hang them in our pumpkin patch!  I'll be sure to post a picture!  The kids did a GREAT job cleaning up after themselves too.  I was so proud of our little artists!