Simple Autumnal Art

I’m not big into Halloween, well not into it in any way at all. I just don’t understand it but we do mark All Saints and the month of All Souls and we talk a lot about festivities around the world at this time of year.

Usually my parents will carve pumpkins with the children; something that they always enjoy doing, but this year due to Covid issues they didn’t do carving (but we have got a quiz day planned instead).

In our Veg Box People delivery we had a rather pretty-looking squash, and, after seeing my friend’s children’s watercolour art I thought it would be a nice activity to try with my three, before turning the squash into a soup.

Art is one of the areas I least like teaching. Drawing and painting is not within my own skill set (I’m much more into needlework and writing for creativity) but we used a lovely tutorial and some watercolour paints and had a go.

Materials needed

Happily, not too many materials are required for this activity:

• WAtercolour paper – we use this one from Amazon
• Watercolour paints. Ink paints are suggested, but we didn’t have these so just used a standard palette and it was more than adequate
• Brushes and water
• Pencil and eraser
• Sharpie
• Screen to watch tutorial
• Squash or Pumpkin to draw

Setting up

First off we cleared the area and set up our squash in the middle of the table. We had a look at it and I got the children to describe it, trying to get the older two to use more descriptive language. I asked them if they thought it would be soft or not, and what they thought the middle would look like when we chopped it up for soup. We observed how the light fell onto the side of the pumpkin and talked about how we might be able to show that in the paintings.

I then set the laptop up at the end of the table and we used this tutorial. The children set about drawing first using a pencil and refining the shape of their squash, We then went over the pencil lines using a black sharpie.

We added our colour using a base of yellow first – I was impressed with how quickly the children got to grips with using the watercolours – they quickly worked out how much water they needed to add versus pigment to get the desired depth of colour.

As we added additional colour it was lovely to see the squash really develop and come to life. I think the children did a pretty good job of their paintings by the end!

The next day we made a delicious squash and peanut soup – it was a little spicier than I have anticipated but delicious non the less!