3D Pumpkin Carving Practice

My 3D pumpkin carving skills got a little rusty from last year so I popped in my Ray Villafane Pumpkin Carving DVD for some practice!

Last Attempt At Pumpkin Carvings, For Now

After my last post, I was so disappointed with the way my 3D pumpkin face and Jack O Lantern turned out that I scoured the internet looking for basic tips on carving faces into pumpkins. I did, after all, still have a cute little mini pumpkin that was a table decoration! What kind of self respecting carver would just let it go? I don't know the answer to that question but I do know that I could not!

I found a video of Ray Villafane on Martha Stewart's show ... well actually 3 videos, it is his whole segment cut into 3 pieces ... but he shows lots of great tips to getting the pumpkin face started and adding eyes! Now, he doesn't give too much away in the videos, after all he is there to promote his DVD for sale, but it was enough to help me make this tiny 3D pumpkin face which is way better then the one I made last week (see post below)!

Here is the video link: http://www.marthastewart.com/861070/creative-pumpkin-carving

I am also re-posting my Jack O Lantern picture after I did a little surgery to make the lighting stand out better!





Yayyy, let's carve something!!!

My 3D Pumpkin Carving Experiments

Sorry I did not post my fall fruit carving pictures sooner, I just was overall not happy with my pumpkin carvings especially the 3D aspect I tried to jump into :-(

This was my most recent attempt at a 3D pumpkin carving, a spooky tree and mini jack o lantern. I payed a little more attention to the weight vs size of the pumpkin as to pick a dense feeling gourd to ensure thicker walls to work with.
It looked really good with the light in it but the photo does not do it justice.

This is something silly I did on the back of my first pumpkin after I realized the walls were to thin to do do what I originally wanted to do.




So I wanted to carve a 3D face in my pumpkin but I did not do a good job picking it out and the walls were too thin to really get enough depth.

Looking evil

The positive news is I found this great de-seeder / scraper meant for pumpkins but I think will work for honeydews and cantaloupe too! It worked so fast and easy, it really took the hassle of taking the seeds and stringy mush out!



The other great result of me carving is pumpkins seeds, I love making roasted pumpkin seeds(and I hate wasting any part of food that you can use)! This is a batch I roasted with olive oil and salt but I also make a sweet version with sugar and pumpkin pie spices.

Next year I want to get one of the speckled or striped pumpkins like the one in the lower left corner ;-)

Happy Halloween everyone!

Halloween Pumpkin Carving

This was my Halloween pumpkin carving, it is definitely not my best work but I am still proud of it. I tried a couple new techniques and did not finish my drawing out my stencil until right before carving my pumpkin, so the whole project was a bit rushed.

I did the stencil myself with a little help from my printer/scanner/copier and I used a tip I saw online that used cornstarch (or flour) to make the tiny stencil guide holes easier to see. Now the tip did as advertised, making the holes easier to see but I had to take more care to make sure all traces of the white powder where gone.

If you look at my stencil, you can see that there is a bat hanging off of a tree branch right in the middle of the pumpkin carving stencil ..... poor planning, my branch was to thin and the bat too big, they did not make it.