If you want a mess-free strategy for pumpkin painting, you’ve come to the right place. Painting in beautiful colors and adding decorative touches sounds nice (and the pictures on Instagram this time of year are incredibly inspiring), but when you’re decorating pumpkins with kids, the simpler the better.

Pumpkin Painting Made Simple

For simple, colorful pumpkins, you can paint with a neat product called Kwik Stix. Instead of buying messy paint and paint brushes, this cost effective method works great for children who want to work create a colorful pumpkin.

Decorating Pumpkins with Kwik Stix Paint

When you’re facing a rainy weekend before Halloween, this simple activity leaves no mess to clean up afterwards. Your children can have tons of fun. With a 24 pack multi-color kit of Kwik Stix tempera paint, your children can draw, color, and decorate the pumpkin however they would like.

First, buy any size pumpkin. Preschoolers can enjoy working with a medium size pumpkin because it has enough space for abstract, creative drawing. Scribbling is the perfect way for preschoolers to try out their emerging writing skills. Since the colors are so vibrant, even the most simple scribbles look beautiful.

With the brighter shades, the paint has a metallic look that kids find very appealing. The green and the gold have an especially nice shine to them.

One of the neatest things about this paint is that it comes in a small container that looks like a marker or a tube of lipstick. This is why applying the paint to any surface is a mess-free process.

If you have a small pumpkin, you can paint stripes for each section. Using this strategy creates a fun, multi-colored design. Simply apply each color to each section. Fill the color in as much as possible to prevent streaks.

As you can see, the paint doesn’t go on the pumpkin as smoothly as liquid paint would, but a major pro is that it dries in only 90 seconds. For that reason, you can’t use the paint to create handprint pumpkins (the paint dries to your hand immediately). To make the paint look as smooth as possible, allow it to dry on the pumpkin before filling in any empty space afterwards.
You can even paint the stem of the pumpkin! With such bold colors, the paint left the pumpkin stem a shockingly bright blue.

When you paint your pumpkin, double check where you are placing the paint stick. Since the stick is large, it can be difficult to place it exactly where you want it to go. To get any smudges off, simply use a wet paper towel and gently wipe it off. Since this will wipe of any paint, you should be careful about where you wipe.

Children love using this fun paints. Allow your preschooler to make whatever silly design they like. Georgiana had the best time scribbling on her pumpkin. Decorating pumpkins as a family was so much more enjoyable than just having one adult carve a pumpkin. It was nice having everyone involved in painting pumpkins.

If you’re really careful with the paints, you can make a smooth surface. I used the gold and red paints to make as smooth of a surface as I could. Even though there were a few spots that didn’t have paint on them, the effect was overall very nice.

To make the pumpkins more festive, we added some adorable Disney character stickers. Remember my post 5 Reasons You’d Love To Spend Halloween At Walt Disney World? Even though we didn’t end up visiting for Halloween, that doesn’t mean we can’t spread some Disney cheer from our home.

On the back of my pumpkin, I created a simple silver heart with a red outline. I loved the effect of drawing with a darker paint on top of a shape. This layered look added a pop of color to the design.

Adding stickers made decorating the pumpkins even more fun. Since the paint dried so quickly, we were able to add the stickers only minutes afterwards. This quick, simple, and mess-free craft was an enjoyable way to spend a Saturday afternoon before Halloween.

When you want a fun, DIY pumpkin painting craft without the mess, Kwik Stix offers exactly what you need. For more information, check out the other paint sets offered by The Pencil Grip company.

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Disclosure

I received a free item, but it in no way influenced my opinion!