Easy Pumpkin Tutorial for Fun Watercolor Painting or Card

Good morning, Deb Watson here, and today we'll have fun painting an easy pumpkin. You'll find the complete lesson free at watsonwatercolor.com. First, let's look at some simple shapes for pumpkins. They can be round, tall, or short. Add the lines for the pumpkin segments, and a little stem at the top, and you've got a pumpkin. Now these are viewing the pumpkin from the side. If you want to add more interest, place the stem area down a bit. Now you draw the pumpkin lines all the way around. Here's the pumpkin from the outline page in this lesson. An easy way to paint watercolors is to work light to dark. I'm starting with the yellow, then going to orange. This is transparent pyrrole orange, and I'm leaving some of the yellow showing through. Next comes thicker paint, especially along the segment lines and the bottom of the pumpkin. If you want to add even more shading, you can mix your orange with a dark brown, a black, or with pyrrole orange, even a purple. Pyrrole orange and purple make wonderful brown colors. Remember that your colors will look lighter when they dry, so don't be afraid to be bold with wet on wet color. If your colors all run together, use a paper towel to dab them up, or a thirsty brush. A brush that's just damp to pick up some of the color. The more color saturation you build up, the more realistic your pumpkin will seem. You can paint the stem green, gray, or brown, but try to have a few dark shadows on the right side. For the background, use a large wash brush and paint your background either lighter or darker than the pumpkin, like my gold background, or a darker one like this dark blue painting. The foreground can be brown, green, any fall color. I put on a medium green and it's not the best, so I try spattering it with a darker green and more orange, but I'm still not happy. For now, I'm just going to leave it and move on. I'll come back to the green later. I suggest a couple green leaves at the top and a reddish leaf at the bottom. A few curly vines are always a nice touch, especially if you add some seeds hanging from the sides. When the leaves are dry, suggest the veins in the leaves with a darker color. Last, I'm going to fix that green. I mix up a dark rich green with phthalo blue and green gold and that is much nicer. If your paintings don't turn out the way you like the first time, just keep going. You can always wash off areas and redo them, or paint a darker color right on top. Happy painting!