Decorate rocks with magical Halloween silhouettes drawn over a vibrant sunset sky!

It has certainly been a good year for all the rock painters, me included. The new trend of painting and hiding rocks this summer has inspired a lot of fun rock creations! The summer is over, but it doesn’t seem like rock painting enthusiasts have given up on their hobby, not even in our northern city. Indeed, the days are cool, but sunny and fresh. In a way, it’s even more pleasant to go on rock hunting walks than before. So I made a few new autumn designs.

These rocks are the continuation of the fantasy silhouette series I made a few months back – with unicorns, fairies and castles. Except this time, somewhat spookier creatures insisted on being present – witches, spiders and jack-o’-lanterns have come to inhabit the paintings!

Materials for Painting Silhouette Rocks

rocks: the ones found in nature are best, since the store bought ones are often too polished for paint to stick. If you do buy rocks, you might have better luck using heavy body acrylics
acrylic paints
copic ink markers/sakura ink pens: I find them very useful whenever I do any painting or drawing. If you don’t have any, you might want to start by getting two or three pens – 005 is a useful size for really fine details, 01 or 02 is good for general outlines, 08 is tolerable for covering big surfaces – obviously, when you’re working on a rock, it’s all pretty small scale. While I find it overall easier to work with pens, you can make silhouettes with black acrylic paint, thinned with water and applied with a fine brush, just as well!
sealant, like outdoor spray varnish: It is essential if you plan to hide the rock in nature, but if you make it as an indoor decoration like a paper weight, it’s optional.
(optional) silhouette designs at the end of the post (you can read about how to transfer them onto rocks – minimum drawing skills are required!)

Painting Silhouette Rocks

1 — Paint the gradient of the sky at sunset. For these rocks, I’ve stuck to the orange colour scheme, in honour of Halloween. Start with brown-orange at the top of the rock and paint a little further than where you want this colour to end. Immediately, without letting it dry, start painting with the next colour, bright orange, below, making sure that the two are blending together where they overlap. Then add the next colour, yellow. Add a little bit of white at the very bottom.

2 — Let the rocks dry completely. With acrylics, it can take a couple of hours. Once the rocks are dry, you can use ink pens for drawing silhouettes on them. I did freehand drawing, but there is a really easy technique for transferring designs onto rocks using carbon paper. You can check my tutorial on how to do it here.

You can see that I would draw outlines first, then colour inside and sometimes add more details with the thinnest pen later.