Last Updated on October 23, 2021 by Sheryl Cooper
Inside: This pumpkin art activity is all about mixing colors on foil – and then making a print! Pumpkin printable included.
Fall means pumpkins, and our toddlers and preschoolers LOVE the pumpkin activities we do in the classroom.
You might recall our spin painted pumpkins we did a couple of weeks ago.
These pumpkin prints have lots of process art going on, just like those spin painted pumpkins.
There’s lots of movement, noise, and yeah, some mess.
But these are the types of art activities that invite our toddlers and preschoolers to feel confident while creating!
How to Mix Colors on Foil for a Fun Pumpkin Art Activity
The best part of this fall art activity is that it doesn’t require many materials.
In fact, this is all you need for your pumpkin art activity:
- A slick surface (we used tin foil)
- Cotton swabs
- Red washable tempera paint
- Yellow washable tempera paint
- Pumpkin printable (the free download is towards the end of this post)
Setting up this pumpkin prints activity:
If using foil, place it on a flat surface. (I taped the edges down because I know how much movement would be taking place and the foil might slip right off the table.)
I then squirted both colors of paint on the foil and also added some liquid dish soap, even though the paint is washable. (This year’s group loves to really get into it, so I wanted to make sure the paint would wash out of clothing.)
I placed some cotton swabs on the surface as well.
Because this was a small group activity, I only had one sheet of tinfoil placed on our activity table.
If you are doing this with a larger group of children, you could give them each their own sheets of tinfoil.
There really wasn’t much introduction needed. I explained to the children that they would be moving the colors around with the cotton swabs. I love using cotton swabs for fine motor strengthening, by the way, because they are short and discourage “fisting”. Using cotton swabs encourages the index finger and thumb to work together. We did this last year with our St. Patrick’s Day art and it was equally fun!
As the children are mixing the colors, they will notice a 3rd color appear. Every single time they love pointing out this new color, which is why I love color mixing activities so much.
I will also be completely real here and share that one group of children eventually ditched the cotton swabs and used their hands to mix the paint. (See? I just had a feeling this would happen, which is why I added extra soap to the paint!)
If you watched the video above, you could hear them squealing with delight as they moved the paint around. They absolutely loved this part!
Once the children are finished mixing the paint (either with the cotton swabs or their hands), take the pumpkin printable and place it face down on top of the paint.
Invite the children to tap and/or rub the paper to pick up the paint.
Then, tell them to lift the pumpkin printable and see what happened.
Pretty fun!
Once the pumpkin print is dry, you can leave it as is, or cut the pumpkin out.
And that’s all there is to this fun pumpkin print art!
