Sunday, October 15, 2006

It's a Pumpkin Eat Pumpkin World

It has been a while since a post, but I wanted to share my picture. I carved the pumpkin eating a little pumpkin. Like a cannibal pumpkin. Someone at my last job did a pumpkin like it and then I found a bunch of other pictures of people who did the same thing. I thought it was cool, so here is my rendition.

















I noticed that some of the hits to my blog were specifically looking for a cannibal pumpkin pattern. Unfortunately, I do not have a pattern, but it was fairly simple to achieve without the pattern.
My particular pumpkin was carved partially with a pattern and partially free hand. The eyes I carved from a pattern, I got the pattern with the carving kit I picked up at Wal-Mart. You could just pick any pair of eyes you like and print it to carve on your pumpkin. I chose not to free hand this part because I wanted them to be symmetrical. I chose a spot for the pupils and scraped the pumpkin skin off to achieve that light yellow effect. This part of the eye (pupil) was not in the pattern, but I thought it added a realism to the pumpkin. You will notice there is no nose on the pumpkin, mainly because I forgot. (There went my realism)
Then the fun part. The mouth I freehanded. I carved the spot for the little pumpkin smaller than I thought it needed to be then slowly carved out more and more a bit at a time to make the space large enough to fit. I used the small pumpkin as the guide, periodically trying to shove it into the larger pumpkins mouth. I made sure to leave the "tooth" as the piece to hold the little pumpkin in the larger pumpkin's mouth. I debated with using a toothpick through the tooth and into the little pumpkin to hold it in place. In the end, I opted to just leave it alone. The tooth held the small pumpkin in place just fine.
The small pumpkin I did not carve. I just drew on him with a permanent marker.
I used WD-40 on the pumpkin post carving. Though it did not smell like anything other than WD-40, my pumpkin still collapsed after 4 days. I would not suggest this method. I think you should just leave the pumpkin as is after carving and let nature take it's course. You should, however, carve closer to the actual event you want to use it for, Halloween, party, contest, etc. OR - you could put your very large pumpkin in your refrigerator and just drink all the beer you have in there to make room. I vote carve closer to the date you will need it.
Hope this "tutorial" helps someone. If so, post pics and comments. :)

1 comment:

Borrego said...

Nice picture, do you mind is I use it?