One Plus One Design & Illustration Blog

Guest Post: Pyrex, Pumpkins and Pipe Organs

We’re trying out something new today! We are proud to present our first Guest Post, by the lovely and talented Shelly McGown. Feel free to visit her Flickr page here, or follow her on Pinterest here.

Longtime friend, and fellow graphic designer, Shelly has a knack for making pretty things. We couldn’t get enough of this fabulous pumpkin she painted up for halloween and asked her to share how she did it.

‘This Halloween, I wanted to do something a bit different with my newly purchased pumpkin. I had carved a pumpkin a couple of years in a row and as fun as that is, it’s messy and requires more planning than I was in the mood to do. To avoid sticky pumpkin innards and pre-carving decisions, I decided to try something new and paint the pumpkin instead. I knew I wanted to paint a pattern of some kind, so I walked around my home looking at books and packaging hoping for inspiration to hit. After a few laps around each room and casual leafing through a couple of books, I hadn’t seen anything that was quite right. That’s when the light bulb went off: what better inspiration is there for patterns than classic Pyrex dishes?’

‘My husband had bought me a couple of pieces from my favourite Pyrex collection – Amish Butterprint – last Christmas, which beautifully illustrates a country harvest scene in a freehand folk art style. Perfect!’

‘After washing and drying my pumpkin and digging out white paint and a fine tipped brush from my trusty art tool box, I propped up the casserole dish and got to work. I started by choosing the best side of the pumpkin, since some pumpkins are tipped back slightly or have marks and bumps in some areas, and began painting the man and woman since they are the centre of the pattern. After that I, very roughly, measured each side of the rest of the pattern to make sure the whole pattern would fit on the rest of the pumpkin. From there I painted the rest of the “woman’s side” of the pattern, followed by the “man’s side” of the pattern. The paint dried quite quickly, but if a mistake was made, I could wet a cloth and erase the error easily. Since I’m right-handed, I made sure I painted from left to right, so that my hand wasn’t resting on a finished area. I used acrylic white paint, because that’s what I had on hand, but gouache would work just as well, if not better, since it’s a more opaque paint.’