Help?
I have been trying and trying to think up some good ideas, but the only thing I came up with is something I am not sure would be possible to do.

I am planning to enter my college's pumpkin carving contest. I've entered it pretty much since they started holding it, and I won first place one year. The problem is, they display and judge the pumpkins in the middle of the day in a well-lit commons area. They are displayed on a long table, and the wall behind the table is all floor-to-ceiling windows. This presents a problem because most pumpkin carvings are meant to be viewed in the dark with a light coming from inside the pumpkin. The last few years I've done some very elaborate carvings, but they just did not show their true potential when displayed in a lighted room! I did a lot of carving where you don't cut all the way through the pumpkin which allows for a more intricate design but it's hard to see the details when you don't have most of the light coming from inside the pumpkin... One year I tried placing the pumpkin inside a black box to block some of the light, with a light inside the pumpkin and the front of the box open to view it. I think the box may have taken away from the display of the pumpkin though...

So anyway, I am trying to come up with some good pumpkin carving ideas which will look great in a well-lit area. Help? Anyone?

I thought of two ideas but I don't know if they would actually be possible to do, or would look very good. One was to have a fake arm coming out of the pumpkin holding a (fake) knife stuck into the front where a face was partly carved, so it looked like the pumpkin was carving itself. (not sure if I could build a fake arm in time or if this would even look very good...) The other idea was to make a normal-looking pumpkin face, but add some fake alligator skin material to parts of the face such as one eye, part of the mouth, etc. so it would look like the pumpkin was turning scaley and becoming something else. The problem with this is I'm not sure if I could attach the material to the pumpkin in a way that it would stay in place (if I could even find material!)

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Why do today what you can put off till tomorrow?

Carve it up the way you want... then paint the insides of the pumpkin black.

The contrast will really make the carving pop.

Or paint the exterior of the carved pumpkin - either way, you want to increase the contrast in order to make the details stand out.

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I'm a Halloween Bride! 10/31/2002

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
~Sir Arthur Conan Doyle