Painted wooden sugar skull craft for Halloween

With Halloween falling at the end of the half-term holiday this year, and with Halloween plans being back on track now that covid restrictions have eased, it's the perfect time to do some Halloween crafting! I did a quick trip to Hobbycraft last week to stock up on some craft supplies, and I couldn't resist buying us each a blank wooden skull to decorate. I thought that they would look great decorated as sugar skulls and I wasn't wrong - look at our amazing results!

This is what we started with - a simple blank wooden cut out. It's about 20cm in height and 15cm across and comes with hanging hole and ribbon. The jaw at the bottom is attached by wire so it is moveable if you are careful when painting.

We began our decorating with a couple of coats of white acrylic paint, which was enough to cover up the blank outlines and give a smooth surface. Then we added extra details with acrylic paint and felt pens, and glued on craft gemstones and sequins. I think it worked well to stick to a limited colour palette so I tried to encourage the children to pick their three or four favourite colours. There is plenty of inspiration online if you need some ideas but you can pretty much let your imagination run wild!

We'll be hanging our finished sugar skulls in the hallway and I'm hoping that they will be used as Halloween decorations for years to come.

If you are looking for more sugar skull Halloween crafts you might like these:

Hama bead sugar skull bunting - including a free pixel art sugar skull design which can be used with Hama beads or other pixel art projects such as cross stitch.

Mini Hama bead sugar skull earrings - using tiny mini Hama beads to make some sugar skull earrings which make a great Halloween costume accessory.

A Halloween picture using Hama bead sugar skulls - Hama bead sugar skulls arranged to make a lovely Halloween piece of art.

For our painted wooden sugar skulls we used this Hanging Halloween Wooden Skull Decoration from Hobbycraft which we bought instore.