Playing with typography

All my ideas seem to resolve around holidays and seasons.  Obviously color and font were really important in creating the look I wanted.  If you couldn't tell the initial idea was to have the word "dance" look something like a pumpkin.  I played around a lot with kerning.  Because it is an announcement type poster I went with a central alignment.  The word "halloween" was interesting because I wanted it to complete the look of the pumpkin as sort of the stem but I had to change up the leading and type sizes.  This assignment made me want to invest in a typography or some sort of design program to see what is possible.