Halloween Paintings and Ideas

I was shocked to read Halloween is just 8 weeks away, because it will slip by so fast and I have a pile of ideas left over from last year.  HGTV posted some cute and pretty fast decorating ideas, and if you want to paint a Halloween painting I am sharing the ones I posted last fall which have some how-to information.  I am planning to make a nice Halloween still life with my trusty plastic skull, that will be coming in a few weeks.

This is a painting demo of two pumpkins backlit outdoors.  It is a nice fall painting because it hints strongly of Halloween but they are not Jack-o-Lanterns yet.  This is 12" x 16" oil on canvas.

 

This is our yard from last year, the ghosts were a last minute idea to make a backdrop.

 

They grow an enormous amount of pumpkins in Half Moon Bay, CA and this is a view looking into a bin of them on a foggy fall day.  This is a 12"x12" oil on canvas.

 

Piper's Sunflowers Drying

Piper's Sunflowers Drying

I liked the previous Piper's Sunflower so I painted a grouping of sunflowers.  This is 16"x20" oil on canvas, no time lapse movie made this time.  These are several more of the dried out sunflowers I enjoyed looking at during my son's bagpipe lessons.  The blue background has a few close value colors to liven it, and I've veered back into impressionism with the colors of the sunflowers. 

One of the things I worked with is the use of a really dark purple, then deadening it with raw umber to make the shape roll back to appear rounded and going over the top of that to indicate the sunflower.  The round one in the center nearer the bottom of the painting illustrates this.  Then the interesting negative spaces needed amping up because the leaf colors were too close in value to the sky.  It is such a scattering of sunflowers that the composition is pretty irregular which is the way they grew.

Little birds came and feasted on these seed heads, quite a nice treat!