Acrylic craft paint is the easiest to work with. It dries quickly, cleans up easily (soap and water) and it comes in 14,582 colors. It's also fairly inexpensive if you buy it at the craft stores ($1-$2 a small bottle). Oil based paint is very smelly, takes forever and a day to dry and you'll need paint thinner, turpentine or mineral spirits to clean up the brushes. If you are doing this project with children, you should definitely use acrylic and not oil based. Of course you could use a can of spray paint if you just wanted to paint a whole pumpkin an entirely different color. That's not what we're doing in this project, but it's a thought if you just want an all over shiny gold pumpkin.