Pumpkin Carving - Craving

Pictures of each step will come once I have started to carve.

Now it is time to talk of the carving. First I have to mention another relevant tool I had forgotten previously. Crayola washable felt pens. These are for transferring the designs onto the pumpkins. With them being washable you can erase mistakes and when you are done carving to clear the excess marks on the pumpkin after carving it.

Transferring the design
After you have made the design on paper it is time to transfer to a pumpkin. The reason that I prefer to do it free hand is to adapt to the contours of the pumpkin and to scale it appropriately to the shape of the pumpkin. Once you have a design on it that you like. It is time to cut.

Breaking the skin.
This is where the paring knife comes in handy. Small knife with a curved blade. Use it to trace along the design marks to not cut all he way but to cut about a quarter of an inch in. This is typically the more arduous and time consuming exercise of the carving. Once it is broken with this easy to use blade it is much easier to carve. After all the skin is broken, take a wet cloth and erase excess markings.

Plan your pieces
As you start carving out chunks it is important to undercut in tight spots to get later. For example if you are to leave a small piece of specific shape attached it can be hard to cut with the weight of the rest of the piece. So cut a larger berth of a section around to come back to later to detail into the smaller piece. Ensure that you leave enough space to get leverage on the piece.

Angle of pieces
The angle of the cuts is important to think about as it can add effect or get in the way of your design. For example you can make something look hollowed, thick and long if you cut at an angle that makes the area of the outer side of the piece larger then the area of the inside of the pumpkin. In some instances you want to cut pieces the opposite to best show a design from how you present the pumpkin.

General tips
Cut all pieces before you push them out. You can easily have small pieces broken off, or other pieces collapse if you are leaving close together thin strips.
Make sure you cut all the way through before moving out a peice. If you do not and try to pull the piece you could easily pull out a section you want to leave.
When moving out pieces cut out dummy sections and remove them to make it easy to remove delicate sections.
When you move the cut pieces out, push them in or out, based on where the larger surface area is
If you have a thick pumpkin you may want to thin the walls in the cleaning process to make it easier to carve.

This post I will edit, with pictures and more advice once I start carving, but I hope that this series has been helpful.

Pumpkin Carving - Finishing Details

Other Tools
Some tools that I failed to mention last time is as follows. A drywall knife is a useful tool but a crude one. Light weight and easy to navigate but use it only for large rough cuts, like the ones you would do to open the top. Another unlikely tool is vaseline. I know right, vaseline, but when you apply it to the inside of a cleaned pumpkin and on the cuts, it will help the pumpkin retain it's moisture for longer and slow the inevitable rotting. A useful thing.

Finishing Details
Though it may seem odd to write about the finishing details before writing about the act of carving the pumpkins themselves, it is for good reason. The finishing details are the thing that you need to think of before you start carving, not after.

The Lid
The first thing you will do when you start with the pumpkin is make a hole to get into the pumpkin. Make the cut at wide angle, and make a square notch in the back. This will act as a key hole to align the lid easily afterward. Make the cut however it best allows you to cut the face.

The Guts
Guts can make for a useful finish. Think of them as vomit, or spittle, or other guts. Use them for puking pumpkins, or as drools from a pumpkin's mouth. If you are doing a zombie themed pumpkin, leave some guts on the lid, and on the inside where the face of the pumpkin is to be. That way when you look into the pumpkin you will be able to see the guts dangling behind the eyes and out of the mouth.

Candles
Tealight candles may seem like a great idea due to cost and abundance. In groups of three or four these may be a fine choice, but when the climate is cold these little candles will not be able to heat up enough to produce a worthy flame, and will not burn brightly. Larger candles an inch and a half tall and an inch in diameter are ideal for this purpose. And will likely last a good four hours.

Removing Skin
This is a technique that I am quite novice on myself. It does something really cool though and that is add an extra layer to the two layer artwork. If you are really skilled you do those awesome pumpkin sculptures...

However this is about pumpkin carving and jack'o laterns, not sculpting. Now what you can do is take a flat wood scraper and scrap the skin down on the design before you ever start to carve. If you try to carve and then skin, you will just destroy the pumpkin. In terms of finish it gives you an additional texture. As I wrote previously I am not too experienced with this but here is a pumpkin done last year to emphasize the teeth.

Pumpkin Carving - The Tools, The Pumpkins and the Plan

Plan
Before you even begin to carve you need a plan. Why? because it makes everything that much easier. The plan doesn't have to be complicated, it is usually enough to have some ideas about what you want to carve. The way I do this is to draw them out. If I can draw them then you can carve them. When you draw them make sure you plan spots to keep structures together. A technique I find helps, I call implied shape. Take for example Hellboy here...

As you can see his horns up top aren't complete lines, instead what I did was leave blanks in the middle of the line. This keeps the structure of the design, and if you mark where the line starts and then were it ends you can remove the middle and your eye will naturally fill in the void. This design I pulled right out a comic book panel and drew up a few times until I got a pattern I liked.

Of course you can do simpler designs too. I do them often, I prefer many pumpkins littering the yard, and for the amount of work that takes, it is good to have some easy ones to do. if you need some ideas I recommend

Choosing Pumpkins
One of the other reasons it is important to have a design before you have your pumpkins is because it will help you when you get your pumpkins. Take Cheeky here for example...

The idea with Cheeky is a zombie with it's cheek ripped off exposing the teeth and jaw. So for carving this a taller, thicker slender pumpkin is best. Tall and slender gives better effect to the wrap around, and the thickness helps prevent it from falling in on itself under it's weight.

When you are choosing your pumpkins think about what size, shape and contour you want. The exterior of pumpkins can have a lot of texture, consider using the natural contour in your design. Something else that is important to think about is how it sits. It is not enough when buying a pumpkin to get one with a great face and shape, it is important to see how your carving will be canvased so place the pumpkin on the ground before purchasing it, take a step or two back and see how it looks where you would display it, and where you carve it.


Preferred tools of the Trade
For the tools, the basics of a knife and a spoon to clean work well. What works better though are these...

That spoon is a spectacular device, you can clean and thin a pumpkin super quick with one of these and with minimal effort. The thin toothed blade makes it easy to accelerate the cuts, and to make sharp corners. Thicker blades, have trouble with corners. What you will need is a good knife though to cut into the skin and start the cuts first. A curved paring knife is ideal to start the skin penetrations. Some other tools to consider is a drill where you need it for making circles such as the small feet of this frog...

If you have the right tools it is of course much easier to do the job and do it better. The scoop, pumpkin knife and a parring knife, total roughly $20. The little blade is good for about ten pumpkins til it dulls, but those are really cheap. I don't know about you, but my time and frustration is worth $20.

Black Guy in George A Romero Films

George A. Romero is a legend to some, and to others he is just some old man, a film maker, but an old man none the less. George A. Romero is essentially the father of the modern day interpretation of the zombie as we know it now in film, games, comics and books. His first film was the black and white The Night of the Living Dead. Then a decade later, Dawn of the Dead, then in the next decade he made Day of the Dead. He is also responsible for Land of the Dead, an Diary of the Dead.

His zombie films are always pieces of there time. Land had the social commentary of consumerism, and class disparity. Diary was about the affects of social media on world altering events. Day was about the mistrust and abusive practices of military in relation to civilians. Dawn was about gross consumerism. And Night unknowingly had a commentary about racism and the emergence of change.

Back in the day, when Mr. Romero was making Night, he freely admits that when they cast his black friend to play the lead it was simply cause of the fact that he was the best actor they knew. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was black at the time. The film however had a group of people holed up in a country house, as the world goes to shit and they are fighting attacking zombies and eachother to survive. In this movie you have a black man portraying a character that is taking charge of the situation, and even slaps a hysterical white women in that time when colored folk were only allowed in the back of the bus. This movie came out at roughly the same time that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.

George was proud of his horror creation, but what made it take off in select circles was the fact that it had a black individual as a strong equal. This made the movie more significant than it was originally intended to be when it was made, not just to audiences but to George. It seems he understood the significance of having a social commentary in films and from that point proceeded to make films that meant more, using zombies as a devices to share a deeper meaning.

Also he made a common theme in his films from that point on. Dawn, Day, Land, each of them have an African American in them that has a greater grasp on the situation of the world going to hell then all else. Avid fans of the Romero films know this, so when people watched Land of the Dead and realized the irony of the black character in that film fitting the role of having a greater understanding of the world of the dead, is the lead zombie. Also George was so impressed with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's participation in Shaun of the Dead got them a role in the film as zombies.

That is my useless fact of the day. Enjoy

Pumpkin Carving Introductions

Halloween has to be my favorite holiday of that year. It is a chance to worship and appease Sam Hain. It is a chance to dress up as the thing you desire to be, to be scary, sexy or just someone else. It is a chance to give and get candy and scare people. As a kid I loved Halloween, I would hit up as many houses as I could, making multiple runs offloading candy as I got my fill. As I grew and became too old to Trick R Treat, I started to decorate my parent's home with many pumpkins and even set up a chimenia atop the drive way to have a fire and set up seats to hand out candy. One year the fire department swung by to warm themselves on my fire. I would occasionally scare kids but in truth I prefer making Halloween something that is simply a lot of fun for kids, because it pisses me off that kids don't stalk the streets as they once have. More of them now go to malls. MALLS for buddah's sake!!! So I love making my place fun and a bold statement to not only draw in kids, but to make it a place that they tell their friends about.

My big thing is carving Jack'o Lanterns. In carving as many pumpkins as I have, I have learned a great deal through research and practice, and now I wish to share some that knowledge and experience with you, the internet through my Pumpkin Carving series here on my blog. I will cover everything from picking the pumpkin, to the tools, the cleaning the designs, the cutting and the final prep work to make a pumpkin more then it is. If you want to see some of my work from last year, here take a look.

Understanding Engineers

Being an engineer I always enjoy reading these types of things. And with the rivalry with Civies, I especially enjoy point 4!

Understanding Engineers #1

Two engineering students were biking across a university campus when one said, "Where did you get such a great bike?" The second engineer replied, "Well, I was walking along yesterday, minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw it to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, "Take what you want." The first engineer nodded approvingly and said, "Good choice: The clothes probably wouldn't have fit you anyway."

Understanding Engineers #2

To the optimist, the glass is half-full. To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Understanding Engineers #3

A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers. The engineer fumed, "What's with those guys? We must have been waiting for fifteen minutes!" The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I've never seen such inept golf!" The priest said, "Here comes the greens-keeper. Let's have a word with him." He said, "Hello George, What's wrong with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow, aren't they?" The greens-keeper replied, "Oh, yes. That's a group of blind firemen. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime." The group fell silent for a moment. The priest said, "That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight." The doctor said, "Good idea. I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist colleague and see if there's anything she can do for them." The engineer said, "Why can't they play at night?"

Understanding Engineers #4

What is the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers? Mechanical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.

Understanding Engineers #5

The graduate with a science degree asks, "Why does it work?" The graduate with an engineering degree asks, "How does it work?" The graduate with an accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?" The graduate with an arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?"

Understanding Engineers #6

Three engineering students were gathered together discussing who must have designed the human body. One said, "It was a mechanical engineer.
Just look at all the joints." Another said, "No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections." The last one said, "No, actually it had to have been a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?"

Understanding Engineers #7

Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.

Understanding Engineers #8

An engineer was crossing a road one day, when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn back into a beautiful princess and stay with you for one week." The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for one week and do anything you want."
Again, the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess and that I'll stay with you for one week and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?" The engineer said, "Look, I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog - now that's cool."