These DIY Halloween Flower Pots will add a cute but spooky vibe to your holiday treats or container garden. Plus, you can involve the whole family and let your imaginations run wild!
How to Make Halloween Flower Pots
If you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you know I love teaching people how to paint terracotta pots. For this easy flower pot craft, I decided to make five different variations with sweet and spooky characters: a ghost, a jack-o-lantern, a black cat, Frankenstein, and a purple monster.
Which one is my favorite, you might ask? Well, these are like my children…I love them all equally!
The main supplies you’ll need are some terracotta flower pots, acrylic paint, and paint pens. I’ll give you some tips below to make these last longer too.
You can use these flower pots as treat bags or planters. For another cute treat bag idea, grab my free Halloween treat bag toppers.
Supplies
- Terracotta pots (2.5-inch, 3-inch, or 4-inch)
- Acrylic paint (this set has all the colors included)
- Paint pens or markers
- Clay pot sealer
- Paint brushes
- Mod Podge Outdoor (optional)
- Small herbs, succulents, or candies (optional)
Step 1: Seal the clay pots (optional)
Before beginning any flower pot craft, I like to coat the inside of the pots with this sealer.
This step is especially important if you plan to add small plants to the pots. When watering the potted plants, water will sometimes leach into the paint and cause stains to appear.
Step 2: Paint the outside of the pots with 1-2 coats of paint
I love these acrylic paints for flower pot painting. Most of my pots needed two coats of paint, especially the lighter-colored ones like the ghost.
Painting terracotta pot with white chalk paint
You’ll notice I’m painting over an old design for the ghost flower pot. It’s perfectly fine to repaint terracotta pots to switch up your look over time.
I decided to paint the inside of the rim about 1/4-inch as well to hide the terracotta color. Be sure to wait one hour between coats for the best results.
Step 3: Add features to the flower pots with paint pens
For each flower pot, I used some cartoon images as inspiration to decide what I wanted my Halloween characters to look like.
Acrylic paint pens work best, which are also perfect for making painted rocks. I suggest using extra fine-point pens to get more accurate details for features like the eyes. You can shop my recommended paint pens below.
Best Paint Pens and Markers
Use these flower pots as inspiration and then mix and match eyes, smiles, and other facial features to make your Halloween flower pots unique. Letting kids decorate their own pots is half the fun!
Frankenstein Flower Pot
For the Frankenstein flower pot, I recommend outlining the hair with an extra-fine point paint pen and then filling it in with a thicker paint marker. Start by painting the whites of the eyes before adding the black facial details.
I chose a small succulent to plant in this flower pot, but this would make a great container for treats or party favors.
Ghost Flower Pot
This “friendly ghost” painted flower pot is such a cutie! An extra-fine paint pen works well for all of these detailed features. If you’d like to make a simpler version of this flower pot, start with making three black ovals for the eyes and mouth.
For another great Halloween ghost idea, check out my DIY cheesecloth ghosts that come with a special twist!
Jack-o-lantern Flower Pot
There are so many different jack-o-lantern faces you could paint on your flower pots. I went with a happy pumpkin, but you can go for scary or silly if you like.
Another spin on this pumpkin flower pot is to paint the base coat white and then have your kids make mini pumpkin fingerprints all over the pot. You can then add the jack-o-lantern faces with a paint pen. See my fingerprint flower pot tutorial for the full visual.
If you want to browse more Halloween designs for inspiration, I highly recommend checking out Creative Fabrica.
Black Cat Flower Pot
This black cat flower pot walks a good balance between spooky and adorable. You’ll definitely want a fine-point marker for this Halloween face, but you can also simplify the features if you like.
Purple Monster Flower Pot
There are so many monster faces to choose from that it was hard to land on just one. Kids would have such a blast coming up with their own monster designs. Can you imagine all the goofy faces they could unleash?
To recreate this look, be sure to allow the whites of the eyes to dry for 20 minutes before adding the other details. This is true any time you are layering colors.
Displaying your Halloween flower pots
These pots turned out so cute, I’m thinking of using them as teacher gifts or favors for a Halloween party. Here are just a few ways you can fill your silly or scary creations.
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