Halloween Fine Art Gift Card Workshop

Hello young artists. I am Antony from Artacademy-USA, an art studio in Manhattan. Today we will be crafting an evoking image prompted by Halloween holiday.

Instead of popular colorful manner, markers and vivid acrylic paints, we will be pursuing a more classical manner, where Wyeth and other great American watercolor artists paved the way for our endeavors. Therefore, the first part shows a preliminary pencil drawing of a pumpkin.

Materials used for this art class:

• Pencil (usual) HB
• Paper - watercolor folded as a gift card.
• Watercolors - at least 12 - preferably 24 colors
• Eraser

Try to draw a nice circle or an oval shaped head. Afterward pay attention in painting the stalk on the top of the pumpkin. It is curved and has a peculiar form that you can see on the attached image. The outline has no curves inside, we will draw them in the next step.

Here we have a preliminary shape that lacks details like bumps, natural for a ripe vegetable. Hence, we add vertical lines from top to the bottom, similar to watermelon stripes. They have to be arched and contain spherically shaped pimples that add realism to the drawing.

Draw widely open mouth and eyes at the end. Both nose and eyes have a triangular shape. The mouth, on the other hand, forms a tilted 8.

With the primary choice of watercolors, we set the goal to craft an extraordinary painting in a classical manner. The style will transform an ordinary drawing into a work of art that can be put on the wall to add more charm to your Halloween decoration.

Let's begin by filing a glass with water. The more water you have, the less time you'll spent to change it, so it's a good idea to fill a couple of glasses and keep them handy.

I suggest using simple synthetic brushes for watercolor paints and try to fill the visibly divided areas. Try working with small parts of the drawing so that the spread of watercolor can be controlled. With that in mind, dip your brush into clear water and fill the desired space with it. When the paper is moist enough, inject relevant colors into that area. This will create a smashed, mixed, beautiful color effects very natural for classical watercolors.

Proceed, step by step. Be patient and cover all blank space as can be seen in the photo above.

Here we have our drawing with colored parts, let's make a separate piece a finished painting. In this part, the main goal is to avoid "paint-by-numbers" type of finish. In order to summarize and group parts of our pumpkin together we fill eyes, nose, and mouth with one color. It will strengthen the grimace. Be aware of covering teeth as they add special emotion to the painting.

When done, trace the thickness in eyes and the mouth that is painted with alike color. It will stress the emotional vibe. Furthermore, our pumpkin is round like a ball, with shades and lights on it. With glaze technique of thick transparent layers be sure to poor greens and strong browns in the shadow part as well as leaving the light side with the previous layer.

Feel free to experiment and keep in mind that classical watercolor techniques are hard to implement, for an amateur, but once you achieved some level, an endless world of mesmerizing pictures will be open for exploration.