DIY Halloween Gourds - The Honeycomb Home

HOW TO TURN YOUR GOURDS INTO FUN HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS BY PAINTING THEM TO LOOK LIKE GHOSTS AND PUMPKINS!

You guys may remember, back in the spring, I made DIY birdhouses out of gourds. I found another bag of dried gourds in my shed last week and had an idea to use them for Halloween.

The shape of each gourd will determine what exactly you can do with it. The good news is regardless of what shaped gourds you may have, there’s an idea for it.

For the ghost/pumpkin gourds, the ideal shaped gourd is skinny on top with rounded bottoms.

I started by painting the whole gourd white. Any craft paint will work for this.

free Halloween templates

While the paint was drying, I looked up Halloween templates online. Free Halloween templates are easy to find, but you may have to size them to fit your gourds. However, I did make two printable sheets that will work well for gourds for anyone who doesn’t know how to do that.

You can find the free printables here:

Halloween template 1

Halloween Template 2

Those are sized to print out on a standard sized piece of paper.

I printed out a variety of templates onto white cardstock. You can use regular paper but cardstock will be much easier to trace. Especially around the more intricate templates, like the witch.

Forgive the bad quality photos, I wasn’t planning on sharing this until they were done and I saw how cute they turned out!

painting Halloween gourds

Next, I started with the ghost face. I traced the eyes and mouth onto the top part of the gourd using a pencil. Then I used a fine-tip paintbrush to fill them in with black paint.

I keep a set of small, inexpensive artist’s brushes around for projects like this. You never know when the mood will strike to get creative.

On the bottom half of this gourd, I traced a round circle. For the circle, I used a small plate to make a template.

Next, I used matte beige paint to color the moon. I purposely only did one coat so that it had the slightly opaque effect you see when looking at the moon.

When that dried, I traced the witch over it. I used a pencil to trace it. Because the witch was very detailed and small, I traced the outline with a fine tip black sharpie before filling it in with paint.

This helped me stay inside the lines in the small areas.

I also had thin black ribbon in my stash and thought that was the perfect little finishing touch. Isn’t this the cutest?

I did several more versions of this style of Halloween gourd. Such as using a different ghost face (right side below) and also using a pumpkin on the bottom rather than a witch.

For the orange pumpkin, I mixed yellow craft paint with leftover rust paint I used on my garden chairs.

It came out to a nice brown orange rather than a too-bright orange that you’d get with regular orange craft paint.

black cat gourd

I had another gourd that was more rounded on top so I decided to make this one a black cat.

I did it much the same way, using templates and tracing them. The cat face was extremely hard (I’m not an artist by any means) so that isn’t perfect.

The only thing I did differently on this one was I used a small round sponge brush to paint the white areas of the face and belly. This made it look more like fur.

Then I used a wider striped ribbon to finish this one off.

With yet another shaped gourd I had, I went with the top half as a witch hat. Underneath the hat area, I traced and painted a black cat.

If I had more gourds in this shape I would’ve done this with the bottom half painted orange and a pumpkin face on the front.

And one other simple gourd I made was a ghost face.

If you want to keep things really simple, that’s an easy one. That gourd had a lot of bumpy spots I didn’t like but they do lend to the Halloween vibe.

Aren’t they fun?

These are a great rainy day project that don’t require many supplies especially if you have any gourds around. If you don’t, they are easy enough to find this time of year. I often see them at flea markets.