7 Easy Halloween Art Project Ideas for Your Classroom

Happy Halloween! As the day of spooks and scares approaches, you’ll probably want to create a similarly spooky art class for your students. Here are some fun and easy Halloween art projects that you can share with your students on the day of tricks and treats!

Candy Skull Self Portraits

Have your students illustrate and decorate their own candy skulls as a fun twist on the classic self portrait! For the younger kids, you could have a printout ready for them to decorate as well. If you have the materials readily available, students may be able to sculpt their skulls instead of illustrating them!

Scary Versions of Favourite Characters

This is a Pokémon drawn in Tim Burton's style by 12-year-old me!

Picking their favourite character from their favourite piece of media, have your students draw and design what a scary version of that character might look like! Whether they’re a skeleton or monster, let their imaginations flow with this fun design exercise. They can either imitate a style of a spookier artist such as Tim Burton, or they can add Halloween-themed elements to their characters, such as fangs or bat wings!

Spooky Silhouette Art

Taking either watercolours or watered down acrylics, your students will paint a warm gradient or sunset as a backdrop before using black paint to add in spooky silhouettes. It could be an old rickety house on a hill, or maybe a black cat next to a dead tree! Start by completing the gradient with paints together, and then allow your students to have creative freedom with the silhouettes they choose. Teach them about finding simple shapes in everyday objects by limiting them to their silhouettes!

Recycled Halloween Lanterns

This project is both fun and environmentally friendly! Have your students bring translucent or transparent recycled materials from home, whether they be plastic water bottles, jugs, or old mason jars. Students can then decorate their bottle or jar with paper machée or watered down acrylic paint to create their own spooky recycled lantern! You can provide the battery powered candle for them to place inside their lanterns.

Spooky Hands

Have your students learn to study the forms of the hands with a ghoulish twist! Learning to draw hands can be a difficult task on its own. Let their imaginations and creativity flow by adding their own spooky elements to them, whether they be eyes in the palms or adding long, sharp monster claws!

Hallow’s Eve Inventory

What would a witch or a vampire have with them at all times? What would their bags look like? Have your students ponder these questions and illustrate their findings as a Halloween inventory! Teach them the basic forms in order to create objects, and let their imaginations run wild with what a monster’s favourite objects might be.

100 Halloween Drawings

These were drawn as a collaborative effort by many Winged Canvas staff members and students!

A great way to challenge a student to explore their style is by drawing 100 variations of the same theme! Whether it’s a bat, pumpkin, skull or other theme, how many different ways can you express the subject if you draw it 100 times? You can adjust the target number of drawings based on the grade you teach (ie. 10 for elementary, 25 for middle school, 50+ for high school, etc.).

If you’d like more free resources for your classroom, check out our resources for teachers section on our blog! Be sure to also check out our Teachers Pay Teachers page, which is full of worksheets and lesson plans that you can use for your class!

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