Fall Art Project - Pumpkin Canvas

I always wanted to be one of those people that change out their wall hangings seasonally. Something bright and cheery in the Spring and Summer; pumpkins, gourds, and leaves in the Fall; Santa, and frosty, bare-branch trees in the winter. A perpetual seasonal Pottery Barn catalog. You get the picture.

I'm not really one of those people, but in my quest to become one of those people, I created an art project that I WILL hang every Fall.

For this project, I used a canvas from Hobby Lobby (on sale, of course), a paint sample from Lowe's, some wall spackle (plenty), and some leftover paint, tinted glaze, and satin poly (water-based).

Here's the finished product.

I was inspired by this great pear art by Tracy on her SoulStyle blog, found here.
So pretty! Love the white-on-white!

The pear art above is fairly large, and I wasn't feeling quite that ambitious for my first foray into wall mud art, so I picked up a 20" x 30" canvas on sale at Hobby Lobby, and got down to business.

I googled for pumpkin art, pumpkin images, etc, and found a photo of a pumpkin to use as my drawing model.  Let the drawing begin!

And viola - my plain old imperfect pumpkin drawn on bare canvas.

Now the fun part!  I used the wall spackle that I already had on hand, which I buy from Lowe's.  

I started filling in the pumpkin sections, spreading the spackle out fairly roughly in the individual pumpkin sections. I worked every other section and let it dry a bit before filling in the remaining sections. I wanted that distinction between the sections.  Otherwise, this thing was going to turn out looking like a beach ball.  I built up a few layers. Then lightly sanded it, and sanded the edges between sections to round them a bit.

Once the pumpkin was filled in, I added a thin layer of spackle to the rest of the canvas, and textured it with a damp stiff paint brush. I just brushed the wet spackle horizontally outward from the edge of the pumpkin.



You can see the light texturing on the background in the close-up below.

Nest stop, paint. I painted the background with some gray wall paint that I had.

Then painted the pumpkin with an orange paint sample from Lowe's. It's sort of an orange sherbet color called Golden Chime.

Too stark, right? Right! So I used some brown tinted glaze to emphasize all the dimension and texturing, and add a little shading. Brush on, wipe off, like stain. 

Glazed the pumpkin first, then the background. Last step was to coat the whole thing with some satin water-based polyurethane. This step is not necessary, but I wanted the whole thing to have the same sheen, and the gray background paint that I used was flat, while the orange paint sample was satin.

Glaze on only the pumpkin

And there you have it. Can't wait to hang it next Fall!

Shout out to Tracy and her beautiful pear art, for inspiring me to try my own wall mud art!