No carve pumpkin ideas with POSCA

Looking for some safe and creative Halloween makes? We’ve got some excellent no carve pumpkin ideas with POSCA.

Getting a collection of Halloween pumpkins together for your spooky decorations is great. But it can be hard work and tough on the hands. Besides do you really want little ones welding knives as they cut into tough squashes?

With POSCA you get the best of both worlds. You will have lots of fun times coming up creating of decorative effects – from super simple to ornate and arty.

You can either use ceramic pumpkins to decorate and keep for next year or wash your pumpkin designs  off to actually cook them afterwards. Plus the wide range of POSCA colours and nib sizes means you can work up big, bold designs and delicate fiddly decorative effects with absolute ease.

POSCA paint markers are a brilliant multi-surface, creative pen – so they are great for Halloween. The pens are non-toxic and water-based so they are great for kids activities. This makes makes POSCA great value as one pen has a multitude of uses.

While POSCA pens are also permanent and bleed-proof on paper, card and canvas, they can also be made permanent on the following:

• Terracotta – bake at 220°C for 45 minutes, then spray with clear varnish
• Porcelain – bake at 160°C for 45 minutes, then spray with clear varnish
• Glass – bake at 160°C for 45 minutes then spray with clear varnish
• Textiles – iron on reverse
• Metal, stone, leather, plastic and wood – spray with clear varnish

Make mini ‘pumpkins’

We know strictly speaking these aren’t pumpkins. But we this is still one of our favourite no carve pumpkin ideas with POSCA. You can get a bag of small satsumas, tangerines or mandarins so you can whip up a collection of mini pumpkins with these small citrus fruits. We have kept it simple with our black POSCAs. As you can see we have drawn some easy ‘cut-out’ faces and some basic illustrations.

For a spider’s web design, we have drawn lines emanating out from the top of the tangerine. Don’t worry about being too precise. Once you have drawn out your lines, use your POSCA marker to draw in curves between the lines. And remember too you can use these designs on real pumpkins by up-scaling them.

Take cues from Mexico

Day of the dead designs are really popular for Halloween, but it is actually a very beautiful event in its own right. It is not a Mexican take on Halloween.

Day of the dead or ‘Día de los Muertos’,  is a celebration of life and death. While the holiday originated in Mexico, it is celebrated all over Latin America with calaveras (skulls) and calacas (skeletons). The Day of the dead is traditionally celebrated on the 1-2 November. It is a colourful, joyful festival  to demonstrate love and respect for deceased family members.

The ornate skull designs are inspired by La Calavera Catrina. The La Calavera Catrina or Catrina La Calavera Garbancera (‘Dapper Skeleton’, ‘Elegant Skull’) is a 1910–1913 etching by the Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada. Originally a satire on an upper class woman of the Porfiriato, the character of La Catrina has become an icon of Day of the Dead. Catarina’s are often depicted with a ‘sugar skull’ design – this is where the beauty of life is incorporate into a skull deign. Features are ornate and colourful and flowers feature strongly in these skull illustrations.

Be inspired by artists

We love taking our inspiration from artists, especially when it comes to our no carve pumpkin ideas with POSCA. We thought we’d see how Matisse-inspired cut out designs would look on a pumpkin.

We think this bright shapes really pop on a dark background. We used our POSCA MOP’R to cover the pumpkin with black colour and left it to dry. Then we got a range of 5M POSCAs to create our cut-out shapes.

We also took inspiration from Yayoi Kusama and her pumpkins. We really took advantage of the round shapes you can make with POSCA MOP’R and POSCA 7M tips to create our circles. We didn’t want to copy directly but we did want to pay homage to this magnificent artist so we mixed up our design a little.

Embrace the seasons

Seeing as Halloween is a lovely autumn festival we thought we’d make a design inspired by autumn.

We created a simple oak leaf design and repeated it around our pumpkin. We used a gold 5M POSCA to out line the design and add dots around the shape. We then employed our gold POSCA brush tip to add flick brush shapes around the leaves. The brush tip also worked really well when colouring the stalk.

Check out our video where we create a wealth of autumn motifs…

More Halloween ideas…

We’ve got plenty of great Halloween decoration ideas. Take a look at our Chalk Marker lanterns (which you can easily use POSCA for) plus our Halloween hacks.