Hi everyone, I'm new here, but absolutely LOVE Halloween. Its by far my favorite holiday. My real addiction is pumpkin carving. Hopefully there are others here that share this. If so, I'd love to see your work, whether you're a beginner or fairly skilled.
Also, if you have questions, I'd be happy to field them.
To start things off, here's one of my pumpkins from last year, taken originally from an Anne Stokes print:
This took me around 8-10 hours to make the pattern (I can post this if interested) and another 12-13 to carve. It was done on a really cool pumpkin. The pumpkin weighed 44 pounds, but was lots taller than it was wide.
Let me know if you wanna see more. More to the point though, I'd LOVE to see your stuff!
Omg what a beauty this is some carving wow!
Last year i did my very first one ever and it wasn't to bad but nothing to conpare to yours . but i would love to see more of your work . And how you did them it certainly will help me a lot to improve mine .
sfam - OMG that is so incredible. You must have the patience of a saint. Every year I have grand illusions of taking my time and really working on a pumpkin. Then I rush through in 10 minutes and hack the poor thing up. That's really beautiful. Please post more!!
Omg what a beauty this is some carving wow!
Last year i did my very first one ever and it wasn't to bad but nothing to conpare to yours . but i would love to see more of your work . And how you did them it certainly will help me a lot to improve mine .
And Welcome to this forum
Thanks for the complements! And I'd love to see your carving, regardless how it compares.
I've been carving since about '97 or '98, and have definitely gotten better every year. Around 2003, I started making my own patterns. At this point, the vast majority of the pumpkins I do are either my own patterns or those from pumpkin carver/pattern makers who have carved my patterns and have cool patterns of their own.
So not surprisingly the short answer is the longer you do it, the better you get! That said, there's a thriving pumpkin carving community who usually congregate around August or so at discussion board on carvingpumpkins.com. This is a TERRIFIC place to get patterns and learn in detail from others on how to do everything from getting a pattern transferred to which tools to use, to carving fake pumpkins and so forth. One of the regulars there has this forum linked on their site - hence my stopping by here when I started pining for Halloween to come already.
But, yeah, I'd love to show you more pumpkins. My most successful pattern in terms of others carving it is draco:
I've had around 15-20 others carve this (or more - this is all I've seen pictures for). I LOVE dragons, and am a big fan of Ciruelo Cabral's work. His Draco painting is one of my favs. I also did an "eastern" dragon on the same pumpkin to go with this, so I would have an "east vs west" thing going:
sfam - OMG that is so incredible. You must have the patience of a saint. Every year I have grand illusions of taking my time and really working on a pumpkin. Then I rush through in 10 minutes and hack the poor thing up. That's really beautiful. Please post more!!
Thanks! And yeah, the carving for me is a very relaxing thing (at least until the pressures of getting done by "show time" start intruding). And I got bunches to show ya.
I did four pumpkins last year on Sleeping Beauty. Here's Malificent on a fake pumpkin (I did her on a real one the year previous, and liked it so much I redid it on a Michael's pumpkin):
Here's her castle - my wife actually did this one - it was definitely her best work yet! (a guy in Ohio named Jamie did the pattern for this one):
Here's Sleeping Beauty:
Here's my centerpiece from last year on an 88 pound pumpkin - Maleficent as a dragon fighting Prince Phillip on the bridge:
I also absolutely LOVE vampires. Here's a couple of vamp pumpkins I've done:
Being a movie buff, I was under the mistaken impression that EVERYONE knew who Nosferatu was. Sadly enough, nobody in my neighborhood recognized this guy. Still, I thought I did a decent job.
This one went over better. This is from the cover of the game Vampire: The Masquerade.
HolyMoly!!!! I can not believe how beautiful and detailed your pumpkins are!! Wow!! I have done some degining pumpkins, they turned out prettty good, for a beginner. I usually have so many thnigs going on that i don't take the time to get alot of pumpkins done, even though i love them. Again, Wow, fantasitc work!! Do you grow your own pumpkins, or buy them?
HolyMoly!!!! I can not believe how beautiful and detailed your pumpkins are!! Wow!! I have done some degining pumpkins, they turned out prettty good, for a beginner. I usually have so many thnigs going on that i don't take the time to get alot of pumpkins done, even though i love them. Again, Wow, fantasitc work!! Do you grow your own pumpkins, or buy them?
Right now I just buy them. I get my large ones (70 pounds or above) near the end of September so I get them before the hotels and business snatch them up (they use them for their entrance way displays). But my mother recently got a place in the country with like 8 acres on it. Either this year or next I'm going to plant seeds and see how they do.
Also, I usually already have a decent idea what I'm going to carve when looking for my pumpkins. Sometimes I need a nice flat "portrait" surface to do a large shot like the Maleficent Dragon above. Other times I'm looking for a round pumpkin - I need this for pumpkin "sculpting" efforts like doing the Star Wars Death Star (posted later). Other times I'm looking for a mid-sized pumpkin with two good "sides" to do two patterns on it, like the two dragons above, for instance. In general, smoother surfaces are usually better - this too is a factor. Most important though is to get one that's not rotted. This has been a real problem the last few years.
You guys here will probably appreciate this one more than most. This is the Lord Of Darkness from the Legend movie:
Unfortunately, the pumpkin wasn't the best to carve on, so I wasn't totally thrilled with his face, but I thought the rest of him turned out OK. I made the pattern from a bust I own:
Incidentally, the pumpkin committed suicide fight before the big show, but I was able to superglue her back into shape (yes, Superglue works AWESOME on pumpkin booboos...I even used it to put back together a 120 pound death star that spit in two!). But apparently, she really wanted to die, and killed herself for good midway through the big night. Here's a shot of her remains the day after Halloween:
The pumpkin carving thread...
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