My Pinterest account is filled with pins I never try. Especially my Halloween Fun Pinterest board. I feel like Halloween just draws the short straw. This year, though, I decided to tackle some of the projects on that list. After our recent apple orchard trip, I used some of our remaining apples to create artwork with my kids.
My Halloween Fun Pinterest Board doesn’t have much on it, but most of it is really easy stuff. Including this pin.
This is a very easy project for the kids and I really should have done it sooner. I was making a roast last week and had an extra potato, so I used a paring knife to cut it in half and created two pumpkins for printmaking. One was a happy, one was sad, but due to a little bit of poor cutting, it actually looked more like a ghost.
With three kids and two stamps, I quickly realized I should have peeled more. I looked around the kitchen and decided to give it a shot with the extra apples from our recent apple orchard trip. I cut them in half, removed the seeds and cut a jack-o-lantern face into it.
We used tempra paints to dip the face of the stamp and used dark colored paper with our project, but you could certainly use white paper with bright orange or green paint.
Here is what we learned:
- The apples become slippery in the paint—much more than the potato. We fixed this by using a wooden kitchen skewer as a handle. It worked great.
- Less is more when it comes to the paint. If you use too much paint, it gets in the holes and causes bubbles. We found it easiest to dip the paint, dab it on a paper towel and then stamp it on the paper.
Go easy on the paint or you’ll have globs on the paper rather than shapes. - We went with jack-o-lantern shapes, but my kids found when they dipped them in the green paint, it looked like Frankenstein and the white paint made it look like a ghost. Experiment with shapes and colors.
This project was a nice way to use apples for more than just food–it’s apple art. We’ve already made apple sauce, apple pie and apple bread. The apples were starting to get a little mushy so this project was a nice way to use up the last of them.
