It’s time for pumpkin painting again! This is my fourth time pumpkin painting and I am so excited. I thought and thought the whole day…what should I paint this year?
2021: Squid Game
2023: Totoro
2024: The Little Prince
I chose a pumpkin without knowing what I would paint. I looked through my photos and finally had an idea: Snoopy, inspired by my best friend who loves Snoopy. It took me so long to decide on what to paint that I didn’t have time to paint the whole pumpkin for a background. Instead, I looked up photos of Snoopy in the autumn setting – and found one! It’s your typical Snoopy and Woodstock laying on the red dog house, but the background had autumn leaves, perfect with my orange pumpkin.
I was a bit worried about the proportions of Snoopy, Woodstock, and the red dog house. That’s always the hardest part when drawing such “simple” characters. For my colors, I grabbed, white, black, yellow, red, orange, and brown. I started with my white paint to paint Snoopy. Once that dried, I added another layer (and another) so that the orange pumpkin did not show. I realized after that Snoopy was a bit slanted on the pumpkin, but it was too late to fix it!
Next, I painted the red dog house. I added two more layers again. The red dog house was actually more challenging than I expected. The angle of the sides of the dog house was hard to visualize. After the red dog house was dry, I started outlining Snoopy and the other details with black paint. I had to be careful for this part, making sure my black outline was not too thick and that I didn’t accidentally paint past the white or red paint.
I debated on whether adding Woodstock or not after my Snoopy and the red dog house was completed. I’ve been using the thinner paintbrush so far to try and capture the details and get the thicknesses I wanted, but Woodstock is even smaller, which makes it harder! The pumpkin did look a bit plain without Woodstock though. I slowly added yellow paint. It ended up looking like a blob, but I tried my best to fix it with the black paint.
This is where I should have stopped painting – but I continued. I added in one tree and some leaves made up of red, yellow, and orange paint…and it did not turn out the way I imagined it. Good thing everyone else I was painting with was basically done painting, so I decided to stop painting too. Here is how my pumpkin turned out:
Overall, I do think I like how my Snoopy turned out. The white stands out so much on the pumpkin! I also liked not having to mix colors this year and painting the entire pumpkin. It was so much easier to hold the pumpkin to paint when you’re only painting on half of it! I definitely cut down on time too. I think it’s time to start thinking about what to paint for next year now.