By Nan Hawthorne

Here is a fun and easy project you can do for Halloween: painting rocks to look like a jack o’ lantern and a piece of  - yum – candy corn!  Use a little imagination and you can do other holiday rocks too.

I got the idea when I saw dozens of rocks painted to look like Easter eggs outside an antique store in Duval, Washington.  I really enjoy it.  You can see several of the rocks I painted and put in my front yard in a picture here.

The first thing you need to do is get some rocks.  That shouldn’t be hard, since they are everywhere.  There are even places that sell gravel and dirt that will let you buy a handful of rocks or some big flat stones.  The difficulty is that it can be hard to find a rock just exactly the shape you want.  I found one triangular rock and one shaped like a D lying on its back.  That’s what gave me the idea to make the one look like candy corn and the other like a pumpkin.  If you can’t find any rocks shaped like these, decide what to paint based on the shape you have.  You might paint a bat, the moon, a black cat, or a ghost.  I covered the whole rocks in this project but you can also just paint a picture on the rock.

Here is what you need for this project:

1.Rocks that are as clean as possible.   Wash each rock thoroughly with soap and warm water, and then let them dry.  You don’t want to have to paint over bits of sand or dirt.

2.Acrylic paints from your craft or hobby store.  They come in sets with a small amount of each color and also in different sizes of bottles.  I used orange, yellow, white and a little green.

3.Any type of brushes will do, whether sponge type or bristles.

4.A black indelible felt marker is a nice addition.

I painted the two rocks white just to make the other colors look better.  That’s how you start.  Paint the rocks white and let them dry.  It doesn’t take long.  When they are completely dry, paint the orange sections and let them dry again.  You won’t have to paint the white part of the candy corn since it is already white.  Paint the yellow section on the bottom, making sure you have a nice straight edge up against the orange.

For the pumpkin use a pencil or crayon to mark the eyes, nose and mouth.  Carefully paint them in with the yellow.  I also painted the very top green and put two leaves on the pumpkin, outlining everything with the black marker.  I think it looks really nice, don’t you?

One nice thing about painting the rocks is that if you make a mistake, you can just wait for the rock to dry and repaint it.  I had to do that with the pumpkin.  I tried to draw the eyes, nose and mouth on with the marker, and they looked stupid.  So I waited for them to dry and painted the rock orange again, waited for that to dry and fixed my mistake.

The most important thing is to be creative and have fun.  There is no one right way to paint a rock.  Whatever your finished rock looks like, it’ll be perfect.