How To Make A Frightening Jack O’ Lantern – Part 3

This is part 3, how to paint your pumpkin, the final post on how to make a frightening Jack O’ Lantern.

How To Make A Frightening Jack O’ Lantern Out Of Paper-Mache – Part 3 — Paper mache pumpkin ready for paint -Jack O’ Lantern Part 3

Supplies For Painting The Papier-mâché pumpkins

The first thing you need to do is paint the entire pumpkin, inside and out, with flat black outdoor paint. You can see I bought a can of Valspar Flat Black – Interior Paint and Primer. Use a can of paint and a paintbrush for this, not a spray can. The latex paint cleans up easily with soap and water and also dries quickly. This will help seal the paper base and create a nice background for the color washes.

Flat black paint and primer.

Paint with flat black paint.

The Painting Process

Scott, who has the website Stolloween.com, has several pins featuring his scary homemade Papier-mâché pumpkins. This was the inspiration for my first paper mache pumpkin.

Another Halloween enthusiast has great how-to videos, too. His name is Jay at UnhingedProps.com and his Halloween Papier-mâché Pumpkin How-To Videos on Youtube are great. After watching these two, I began to utilize methods from both.

Scott and Jay each had different techniques for painting their pumpkins. My technique is a combination of these two. I like the black showing through the oranges of the pumpkin as Scott does and I like the layering of the color washes that Jay used on his. The dark recedes and the light comes forward. Use this technique to call attention to and highlight certain features.

Apply White Kilz Latex Primer And Sealer

Next, lightly dry brush white latex primer over the black painted surface. For this process, I used a cheap flat chip brush. This highlights and accents some of the texture and the raised areas.

Supplies Needed For Applying The Color

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You’ll also need a couple of shades of orange craft paint. I used Apple Barrel pumpkin orange 20588 and a darker orange shade 20561 of acrylic craft paint. Then, use another bottle of DecoArt Americana Cadmium yellow paint to lighten the pumpkin color a bit. You can use different shades, but be sure to use colors that have more pigment and less white in them.

The paints used on the ridges of the stem are Apple Barrel Woodland Green, DecoArt Americana Light Avocado, and Delta Ceramcoat 04005 Fire Red. I couldn’t find the woodland green on Amazon, but it is close to pine green.

Paint The Jack O’ Lantern Part 3

This time around, I decided to just use a stippling technique. For this process, simply use a large round hog bristle brush. The hog bristles are much stiffer than a regular soft-bristle paintbrush. It works better for stippling.

Dip the bristle tips in the paint and gently dab on a paper towel. You don’t want too much paint on the brush. Be sure the paint is not too wet. You’ll have a wash, not a stipple.

You can see that the dark orange is stippled onto the peaks and ridges of the details. Little or no orange is applied to the valleys where the black is prominent. What a difference the orange makes! The details are really intensified.

After stippling the entire pumpkin with the dark orange, using the lighter shade of orange, stipple just the center areas on top of the darker orange. Then, step back and take a look. There seems to be a lot of black showing on the left side above this little fella’s eye. I’ll fix that.

Paint The Stem

A couple of years ago, I made a pumpkin with twine accents. Covering the stem with the dark green and the lighter avocado, I realized the greens I used looked too bright. I brushed a wash of umber paint over the green and it didn’t really do much. I quickly wiped it off. This is a pretty forgiving medium. If you don’t like it, wipe it off, and try another.

Unique Paper Mache Pumpkins - You'll Hate To Miss This — Painting the Stem

I wanted to gray down the bright green. If you want to gray down a color, you use the opposite color on the color wheel. The opposite of green is red. So, I used red paint on top of the green and that is how this effect is achieved.

A Different Paint Method For This Pumpkin Stem

First, lightly brush just the ridges highlighted by the white Kilz with the dark woodland green paint. Avoid the black-painted valleys. Then, dry brush a little of the avocado sparingly over the dark green. Lastly, dab a little of the red very sparingly over the ridges.

The red paint grays down the green slightly. It should be barely noticeable, but it adds just a touch of interest. A flat green would not have as much life.