29 Creepy (and Cute!) Halloween Painting Ideas for 2025
If you need Halloween painting ideas for fall, you've come to the right place. Autumn’s chill brings with it a great opportunity to get creative indoors with all manner of easy painting ideas that can even take the form of seasonal decorations and spooky home décor.
As outlined by Psychology Today, pursuing creative interests can have tangible benefits, including positively influencing mood and life satisfaction. As winter approaches, it's more important than ever to pursue interests that leave you feeling fulfilled. Need some Halloween-themed art ideas? From scary Halloween painting ideas to fun and cute creations, we’ve rounded up some great ideas for celebrating the season with paint that can be a fun activity during your celebrations, as seasonal-inspired art projects or for setting the perfect Halloween scene for trick-or-treaters.
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- Fun Halloween Painting Ideas
- Cute Halloween Painting Ideas for Kids
- Scary Halloween Painting Ideas for Adults
Fun Halloween Painting Ideas
1. Spooky Paint and Sip
This Halloween painting idea brings fun and creativity together where they belong. Head to a paint and sip with your friends or family and enjoy delicious drinks as you each create a spooky Halloween-themed painting. With no shortage of opportunities to get tipsy, you might even call this the perfect fall party idea.
Find a paint and sip for a fun night of drinking and painting. If you've been searching for something romantic to do with your sweetheart as the weather changes, this Halloween date idea is just the ticket.
2. Follow a Movie Makeup Tutorial
One of the best ways to get seriously realistic makeup effects, whatever your Halloween costume, is to look to the professionals of the silver screen, many of whom can be found online for behind-the-scenes peeks.
You can get awesome Halloween painting ideas for faces and tips for painting the perfect zombie mask, witchy prosthetic noses with warts and more.
3. Take a Mask-Making Workshop
Papier-mâché mask-making is an easy and fun Halloween painting idea for both adults and children, offering a great opportunity to make something truly unique, whether it's silly or scary.
Many workshops provide ready-made, sturdy masks for painting, while others let you build a papier-mâché creation from the ground up to your specifications.
4. Rework Museum Classics Halloween Style
The great master painters of the past several centuries did a good job of capturing the beauty of the natural world. Consider creating your own versions of their classic paintings in pure horror. Repaint Munch’s "The Scream" or Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" with a Halloween twist. They are also great Halloween paintings on canvas to hang during the season.
Learn this and more at a Halloween-themed art class. Offered at venues around the country, you can find courses in various mediums, including watercolor painting, pour painting and even on the specifics of paint mediums. Learn to paint with a local art class or enroll in online painting classes and bring your Halloween painting ideas to life from the comfort of home!
Cute Halloween Painting Ideas for Kids
5. Upcycled Halloween Décor
If you’re like many homes, you’ve amassed a number of wooden lawn signs and decorations that may have seen better days.
What better way to upcycle your Halloween painting idea than to deck these out in Halloween colors, Halloween quotes and scary text like “R.I.P.” or “Beware!“ with some paint for some DIY fall décor?
6. Make Fork Monsters
A great beginner Halloween painting idea and a fun kids Halloween idea is to dip plastic forks in acrylic paint and stamp them onto paper. Add painted or googly eyes, feet, and other details and you have the perfect spiky little monsters.
7. Create Handprint Ghosts
A fun activity and Halloween painting idea to do with younger kids is making handprint ghosts or monsters. Dip hands in non-toxic white paint, press them to black construction paper, then allow kids to add other elements to customize their ghosts. It also makes a fun keepsake for future Halloweens.
8. Paint Pumpkins Instead of Carving Them
A great alternative to carving, painting the exterior of pumpkins allows you more creative agency and lasts a bit longer through the season.
Painting pumpkins, large and small, can be a fun activity for all ages. It also allows for vivid and bold colored colors (or even black ones). Get inspired with unique pumpkin painting ideas that will bring your fall porch décor to life.
9. Paint Rocks
Readily available outdoors, rocks and stones of all sizes can be painted with Halloween character faces like Dracula, Frankenstein for a spooky Halloween rock painting idea. Then place your little artworks along paths and in gardens for a nice, horrific surprise.
10. Make Apple Print Pumpkins
A halved apple, when dipped in orange paint and stamped on a sheet of paper, makes the perfect ready-made pumpkin shape, making this another great Halloween painting idea for preschoolers and young children. Just add stems, Jack-o-lantern faces and green tendrils to the orange prints.
11. Make Painted Mugs
You can get various colors of paint at most craft stores that will allow you to customize your crockery, most of which can be set in an oven in lieu of a kiln.
A custom mug decked out in pumpkins and ghosts is perfect for hot cider, hot cocoa, pumpkin spice lattes and all manner of fall beverages. It's also a fun Halloween painting idea to do as a party activity.
12. Make Frankenstein Lanterns
Halloween is a perfect opportunity to line your sidewalks with monstrous luminaria with a simple Halloween craft idea. You will need white or natural paper bags and candles (or LED lights).
Just paint them green and black, add eye holes and you will have a series of Frankenstein faces to greet your trick-or-treaters. You can also leave them white to make excellent ghosts.
13. Paint Your Pet
Pet paintings are always a fun way to honor your animals and decorate your home. Kids will love painting their pet in Halloween costume regalia for the canvas or simply paint their pet as the tiny monster they are. Pet portraits are also a great acrylic painting idea for beginners.
Scary Halloween Painting Ideas for Adults
14. Put a Monster on It
A fun upcycling Halloween painting idea is to take boring thrift store paintings of prints and add monsters, ghouls and other creatures to otherwise peaceful landscapes and still lifes.
Where a floral Thomas Kincaid painting of a landscape may not be quite what you need, a Kinkaid with Godzilla stomping through the brush may be the perfect solution.
You can also add a sea monster to one of Monet’s paintings of waterlilies or Michael Meyers to a rural landscape for a fun Halloween movie painting. A day of thrifting and creating also makes a creative couple painting idea or fall date idea!
15. Create Ghostly Spirit Photographs
You can transfer most laser-printed images from one sheet of paper to another using acetone or nail polish remover, which means you can easily make your own spirit photography experiments on par with the Victorian Spiritualists who attempted to capture the spirits around us in the earliest eras of photography.
For this vintage Halloween painting idea, add your transfers to existing photos, paint them purple or green to look authentic and see if you can fool your friends or create some cool effects.
16. Make a Haunted Dollhouse
Another fun upcycling project, you can create a phenomenal haunted house out of an ordinary dollhouse with some paint and other materials like paper, miniature furniture, creepy accessories and a little ingenuity.
17. Blacklight Body Paint
Using neon paint, paint on black paper, cardstock, fabric or even black velvet to create amazing blacklight posters that, when illuminated by a blacklight, emit a spooky, otherworldly glow. You can also make glowing patterns for a more trippy painting idea.
18. Play With Creepy Old Photos
For a fun vintage Halloween painting idea, cabinet card photos can be found aplenty in thrift and antique stores, usually at reasonable prices.
Already giving off a creepy vibe, they are especially fun to alter with paint or paper collages. You can also find printable versions online. Add them to some ornate frames for great Halloween decor.
19. Paint a Custom Spirit Board
An interesting, but possibly demon-summoning, Halloween painting idea is to paint a custom Ouija board. You can either start from scratch with cardboard or customize a thrifted game board version. They make great pieces of art all year long, but especially around spooky season.
20. Paint It Black
For another simple yet scary Halloween painting idea, consider buying some cute animal or human figures from the thrift store and painting them with matte black paint. They will go from adorable to horrifying with just a couple of coats.
21. Make Spooky Tattoos
You can get printable tattoo paper from most craft stores and online retailers. Just create some great Halloween and horror-inspired tattoo ideas and print them out for some seasonal fun that lasts around three to five days. This also makes a great art idea for teens.
22. Create a 3-D Haunted Portrait
3D holographs or lenticular paintings are all the rage in Halloween décor, featuring an image that changes depending on the angle you view it from. You can paint your own scary Halloween painting idea by manipulating the plane of vision via this great tutorial on creating lenticular paintings.
23. Collaborate With the Dead
Another activity of the spooky Victorians, people believed that an artist could be moved, through automatism in a trance state, to commune with the dead by allowing the spirits to manipulate their pen or brush on the paper or canvas.
For a creative yet kind of scary Halloween painting idea and party activity, try giving your guests markers or paints and summoning the spirits to make art.
24. Capture Fairy Skeletons in a Jar
Most dollar and discount stores sell small decorative skeletons for a variety of craft purposes. You can paint them black or ghastly green, add some paper or mesh wings and stuff them in a jar for a great piece of unique seasonal décor.
25. Recreate a Crime Scene
Stage a murder scene for your next Halloween party idea. Add some police tape and use chalk or glow-in-the-dark paint to draw silhouettes on the floor and against walls.
Whatever your level of experience and style of celebrating Halloween, these seasonal Halloween painting ideas will provide hours of fun and amazing decorations and décor. From scary to sweet, there’s something for everyone.
For even more fun art ideas, check out other experiences happening on Classpop!
