In this Instructable, I will be teaching you how to incorporate a fall twist into your paintings, that include our favorite multi use seed, The Pumpkin Seed! Essentially, I will be teaching you how to paint and glue pumpkin seeds onto a canvas in order to create a dimensional painting of a sunflower. I thought of this idea while in my own Food Engineering Class. I saw the Pumpkin Challenge and thought about how cool it would be to do a project like this for school. I am new to Instructables but I am nevertheless excited to be able to share my knowledge and ideas with others.

Supplies

Large paintbrush (1)
Medium sized paintbrush (1)
Fine tipped paintbrush (1)
Canvas (1)
Elmer's Clear Liquid Glue (1)
Pumpkin seeds (these can be found at your local Walmart or Giant Eagle, or if you would like you can get them yourself from your very own pumpkin)
Styrofoam plate ( this is used for mixing paint)

( These are the colors I am recommending, If you would like to use different ones then that's fine too!)

Light blue paint
Light green paint
Dark green paint
Light brown paint
Dark brown paint
Light yellow paint
yelo paint
White paint
Black paint

Step 1: Plan Out Your Sizing

The first thing you want to do during this project is plan out where you want to fit everything on your canvas. This will depend on what you want your painting to look like. You can look at my example above and copy that, or you can simply use a horizontal line and two circles of varying size to create your own arrangement. I will advise, however, that you put the line somewhere around halfway through your canvas horizontally, because this will become your horizon line. Another tip I have is do not make your circles too big. You can go back and change this later, but it's best to plan ahead.

Step 2: Paint Your Sky

The first thing we are going to do is get our base for our background. This includes painting the sky and the ground, and because the sky is the lighter color, we are going to start with that one. Using brush strokes that move left t right across your whole canvas, use your biggest brush to get the base color of the sky using your blue paint. Paint down to your horizontal line and make sure you can't see any white canvas peeking through.

Step 3: Paint Your Ground

Now we are going to pain the second half of our canvas. Take you light brown paint and repeating the brush strokes from before using the same brush, paint the bottom half of your canvas light brown. Once you get to the horizontal line from before, add some sloppy humps to the horizontal line so the dirt looks a tiny more realistic rather than just being a straight line. Next, you're going to take your light brown paint and dark brown paint and mix it together. Add small dots of this color throughout the dirt and then using a sponge, dab the paint so it blends with the base color to look more natural. This will add texture to your dirt and make it look better in the long run.

Step 4: Add Clouds to Your Sky

When adding clouds, it's easy to add too much paint and then have your cloud be too opaque. So, when we are completing this step, rather than using a paint brush, you are going to use your sponge once again. My strategy when painting clouds is to take small dots of white paint and place these dots in a shape resembling an oval. This only takes about five small dots. Next, take your sponge and blot the paint so that it looks like a thin layer of patchy white paint on your canvas. repeat this step a few times on top of your first attempt until you think your cloud looks realistic enough to your liking.

Step 5: Painting Your Pumpkin Seeds.

Like most of you, this was one of my first times painting pumpkin seeds. After trying out multiple different ideas, I think this way works the best. Want you want to do is squeeze out a line of your light yellow paint and then on the right side of it, squeeze out a line of your mustard yellow paint. Take one of your pumpkin seeds and place it onto of the paint and push down lightly so that the entire side of the pumpkin seed is covered in paint, like in the photo above. Now, take the seed off the paint and grab your paintbrush. Use your paintbrush to smooth out any excess paint. Repeat this with your other seeds until you think you have enough. I only needed twenty five seeds, so I would recommend making between 25 - 30 seeds before continuing. Set these aside for later.

Step 6: Painting Your Stems

Our next step is to use our light green paint and our dark green paint to create a stem for our flowers. First, Take your medium sized paint brush and use the light green paint to create a line about three centimeters thick coming from the bottom of the canvas to the general area of where you wanted your sunflowers to be. Add more paint until the lighter green color is opaque. Now, add your dark green to the left side of the light green. Have this overlap onto the light green. Then, using a paint brush, lightly blend the colors to give off the affect of shadows.

Step 7: Painting the Sunflower

For our final step, We will need our dark brown paint, our glue, and the painted pumpkin seeds from earlier. First use your dark brown paint to paint a rough circle. You might want to mix some white with the brown and paint it so that the middle of the sunflower is a lighter than the edges. You can see an example of this from the picture of the stems. Next apply glue to the back side of your pumpkin seed. Only use a very little amount of glue should be used so that your painting does not look sloppy. Then, Glue down the rest of your seeds to form a circle around the middle of your sunflower and you are done! I hope you like your painting!