Work on still life art with real fruits and vegetables while mixing your own fall color tints and tones. Use acrylic or tempera paint in red, yellow, blue, white and black to mix your own tints and tones of harvest colors such as green, gold and orange. Cut apples, gourds and corn-on-the-cob to reveal a cross section. Dip them into the paints you mix then press on heavy-duty art paper to create a harvest still life. Use a brush to add details such as the table they sit on, leaves and stems.
Use chalk pastels to create beautiful harvest artwork. Create an art composition of an old wood fence, haystack, scarecrow and pumpkin patch. Make some of the pumpkins large and toward the bottom of the picture so they appear close to the viewer. Use chalk pastels with a light touch, blending them into tints and tones as you work on light blue construction paper for a realistic looking outdoor harvest scene.
Create a cornucopia collage or mosaic from bits of torn paper. Gather various papers of all types and textures for an unusual effect or simply use construction paper. Use as many colors as you feel you will need for the cornucopia and contents. Tear paper into tiny pieces, about the size of your fingertip, making a stack of each color. Sketch a pencil outline of a cornucopia filled with harvest fruits and vegetables. Working on one area of the collage at a time, glue the pieces closely together to create the picture. You can add background to the picture in the same way to cover the entire paper with torn collage bits for an eye appealing effect.
Use the same technique to create three-dimensional Indian corn bundles. Cut brown craft paper or paper bags into long ovals of any size you wish to make. Tear bits of paper in Indian corn colors. Glue these onto the brown paper oval in an oval to almost fill the brown paper. Once dry, gather the brown paper at the top and bottom while slightly rolling the edges inward to create an Indian corn shape. Use raffia to tie and secure the top and bottom of the brown paper in the rolled shaped so that it retains an Indian corn appearance.
Create 3D harvest art in a variety of ways. Gather acorns to hot glue onto a purchased or handmade grapevine or raffia wreath. Embellish the wreath with harvest colored ribbon, a variety of nuts and miniature, decorative gourds. Create a pumpkin centerpiece from a child's plastic Halloween pumpkin pail. Lay the pail on a large piece of harvest print cloth, gather it up around the pumpkin into the inside, and secure with hot glue. Add floral foam to the bottom of the pumpkin into which you push sprigs of dried harvest flowers. Create personalized scarecrows using rustic, natural items such as sticks, fabric scraps, raffia, cotton filler, hot glue and fabric markers. Make miniature personalized ones to use as tabletop place cards or create the largest ones to use as porch or garden decorations. To stand them up, push the bottom of the small ones into pieces of floral foam you cover with raffia or push large garden scarecrows into a soil-filled flowerpot.