Costumes, candy, and haunted houses are just a tiny part of Halloween. Why not embrace this perfect season as a chance to unleash your imagination with fun Halloween painting ideas?
You don’t need to be an experienced artist to paint eerie themes or cute and fun graveyards with adorable ghosts. This blog will inspire your Halloween painting ideas with simple tricks and more intricate and challenging ideas for expressive art that bring this season to life.
Grab your favorite brushes and acrylic paints and explore some fantastic ways to paint the haunting side of Halloween.
Quick Beginner Tips:
- If you’re a beginner, you may want to consider priming the canvas before you begin painting. Priming creates a barrier between your paint and the canvas, ensuring the paints adhere to the canvas and create a smooth surface for paint to perform its best.
- Do you find that acrylic paint dries too fast? Consider an affordable additive that slows down the drying process, allowing you more time for blending.
1. Whimsical Ghosts on a Midnight Canvas
There’s nothing wrong with starting your Halloween painting journey with something a little classic, like dancing ghosts on a dark, midnight canvas.
Whether you want to paint playful, floating spirits or something more eerie, the supplies for this Halloween canvas painting idea are simple and easy. All you need with your brushes are:
- A canvas size of your choosing
- A piece of chalk or a white chalk pastel pencil (for a rough outline)
- Very dark blue, gray, or black paint for the background such as Payne’s Gray, 174 Neutral Gray 5 or Bone/Ivory Black.
- Titanium White acrylic paint
- A few different shades of Gray for value, best made by experimenting and mixing black and white.
After priming, lay your dark background color with your giant brush or a convenient sponge brush for larger canvases. When using acrylic paint, it’s essential to let your background thoroughly dry before adding your ghosts so that the underlying dark paint does not lift or smudge your ghosts.
After drying, outline where you would like your ghosts to be, their general shape and size, and any features (such as eyes, nose, and mouth) with a piece of chalk or a white chalk pencil. With a soft brush, use your white acrylic paint and begin painting the form of the ghost and let dry.
Once your ghost is ready, use various shades of grey at hand to paint lines along the bottom of the ghost, creating shadows to suggest sheet creases. You can then paint eyes or any other features with your dark shade for a ghostly, good, easy Halloween painting idea.
Beginner tip: Want to go bigger? Add midnight blues and subtle purples along the top of the canvas and scatter stars by dotting or watering down acrylic paint (but cover your ghost!) and “splatter” in white, yellow, blue, or purple for a night galaxy look.
2. Ominous Forest Silhouette
A sinister forest in deep shadow reaches bare branches, almost like fingers, into the sky against a mysterious night sky. If this captures your imagination but seems too complicated, let’s reassure you that it is one of the simpler yet striking acrylic Halloween painting ideas you must try.
How to do it:
- Layer deep purple acrylics with oranges and reds to create a misty twilight background. Since you’re layering, either work quickly or use a special additive to slow the drying process so you can blend and play with these colors.
- Let your background dry, then use Payne’s grey or black acrylic paint to create shadows of pine trees, trees with no leaves with witches on brooms, and crows perching on branches, or buildings.
This painting project ranks highly among my favorite Halloween painting ideas because the key is having fun with the contrast in colors without worrying about details and precision.
3. Creepy Candles with Spine-Chilling Floating Skulls
This year, try something a little more edgy with your canvas by featuring melting, drippy wax candles and grinning, floating skulls.
How to paint the candle flames:
- As the flame is hottest at its base, use white at the bottom near the wick and white highlights at the top of the candle wax.
- As the flame gets cooler, the further away from the wick, shift through colors like white, yellow, orange, and red at the very top of the candle flame.
Painting the candle body:
- Start with a thin layer of white on a dark background in a rectangle candle shape. Don’t worry about even or perfect lines.
- Take a small detail brush and paint a second or third layer of white paint along the upper rim of the candle below the wick, and paint wobbly lines of white for the dripping wax.
Painting the Skulls:
- Be as detailed or as soft and unfocused as you want. Like the candle, start with a thin layer of white paint, then add shadows and weathering by utilizing a raw umber of raw sienna.
Add some experimental Halloween acrylic painting ideas and details by using metallic or neon paint for pops of color to draw the eye.
Creepin’ It Real Easy This Haunting Season
From ghosts and ghouls to Gothic portraits, these acrylic Halloween canvas painting ideas offer a wide range of creative outlets ideal for anyone of any experience. From the beginner to the seasoned artist, the key to making fun and delightful paintings lies in experimenting and embracing imperfections that create one-of-a-kind works of art.
If you’re ready to dive headless horseman into these easy Halloween painting ideas, we’ll help you gather your supplies and start!
Shop Nova Color acrylic paints today and bring your hair-raising ideas to life!