Halloween Handprints! There's still tons of time to make these before Trick-or-Treating!

There's all sorts of things you can make with handprints! I love handprint art. There's something about preserving the size of those sweet little hands... I look back on Froot Loop and Cocoa Puff's little handprints and I wonder how they ever could have been so small. They're growing up way too fast. 

Froot Loop and I made a bunch of Halloween painted handprints when Cocoa Puff was hanging out with the grandparents overnight. It was the perfect one-on-one activity and we both had a lot of fun. I recently bought a bunch of acrylic paint

We ended up making pumpkins, ghosts, spiders, a spider web, candy corn, a witch, a cat, and a bat. 

For the pumpkins, I painted his whole hand orange except for the phalange of his third finger, which was painted green. He pressed his hand onto the paper with his fingers loosely held together. 

The spiders were the whole hand minus the thumb painted black. We did the first one, then overlapped the palms with the fingers going the other way. I think the spread out fingers looked better than the closed one we tried. 

For the spider web, Froot Loop had his own idea, so he just stamped his hand a few times in random directions on black paper. I think it would have looked more like an actual web if we had done a radial pattern, but I do like how it turned out, especially because it was his own creativity.

The candy corn was fun. Since we did it on orange paper, I did not use any orange paint, but I painted the bottom third of his hand yellow and the fingers of his hand in white and then held his fingers closely together as we stamped his hand. If you're doing this on another color of paper, just paint the middle of the hand an orange color. 

The ghosts were also pretty easy. We just painted his whole hand white and stamped once again with fingers loosely together. 

For the witch, we used green paint over the whole hand and I had him spread his fingers out a little bit. 

The bat was done similarly to the spiders, but we also painted the thumbs. Also, I had him hold his fingers tightly together so that it looked more like wings instead of legs. 

The black cat I think was the hardest. I painted his hand except for his third finger black and then had him hold his thumb and pointer finger together and his ring and pinky finger together, kind of like a messed-up Vulcan salute. It made the ears huge, but you can still tell what it is. 

I wanted to do a few more of these (like a mummy, frankenstein, a moon, etc), but by this time, he was ready to move onto his next activity, so that's where we left it for the day. He helped me design the rest of the design of them, like picking out what shapes he wanted for the pumpkin faces, and if the spider/bat/cat was going to be happy/sad/mean/etc. and I just painted them on there once they dried. The witch needed hair and a hat and almost all of them needed eyes and a mouth. 

I just LOVE these. I think they're adorable! Most importantly, it was a super fun mama-son activity. 

Do you decorate for halloween?