Yayoi Kusama is world-famous for her polka dotted art. Some of her most famous artworks are of polka dotted pumpkins. Did you know that she uses this painting technique to help manage her mental health? The repetition of making the dots to soothe and calm her busy mind.

I introduced these dotted fruits in a workshop and now I can’t stop drawing pumpkins. They are compelling, calming, and each one turns out differently. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. We are not trying to copy Kusama’s work but to find inspiration in her art and developing our own techniques.

How to Draw a Peaceful Pumpkin

Dots are fun and easy to play with. Turning them into pumpkins is a fun challenge. Let me give you a quick how-to so you can try them for yourself.

1. Lightly mark a pumpkin shape on your paper using a pencil
   • The body of the pumpkin can be a single oval (like the mouse example above) or individual lobes
   • Add a stem made of an oval and curving lines down to the top center of the body.
2. Start drawing dots in the front-center lobe of the pumpkin
   • The biggest dots are along the center line. They are flanked by smaller and smaller dots. The smallest dots form the edge of the lobe.
3. The lobes to the side start with large half-circles. This creates an overlap effect from the previous lobe.
4. Continue until your pumpkin is full of dots.
5. Decorate the stem with dots or lines.
6. Color in as desired.

Make it even more peaceful

Creative rules to guide your drawing can help you to dial in more relaxation. They engage your brain in a way that lets your doubts fall away, leading to more confidence, deeper concentration, and sometimes surprisingly beautiful results. Follow your own rules and see how the pumpkin turns out.

Some rules I used in the examples above:

• Each smaller dot is half the size of the previous one
• The center lobe gets extra dots for decoration
• Every lobe has a slightly different arrangement
• Set the number of dots per lobe
• Colors alternate light and darker

Since you make these rules, you can also break them. There is no pressure to follow them precisely if they stop working or you think of something better along the way.

If you draw some peaceful pumpkins, I would love to see your work. We have a Facebook group for sharing artworks: Drawing Meditations Adventures