Pumpkin Carving 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, cancellation of FreakFest 2020 and other financial factors, instead of doing a costume build this October I decided to carve pumpkins and bring back my once annual tradition of carving a self portrait into a pumpkin.

The first carving I did was the first panel of the This Is Fine meme/webcomic by KC Green. This ended up winning the pumpkin carving contest at The Bodgery and also sat at the top spot in the Pumpkin Carving subreddit the day it was posted. It was carved using a combination of clay carving tools, some stainless steel carving tools that I made and a dremel. The pumpkin was opened from below to allow easier placement of a light bulb. A light bulb was used because there are no openings for airflow meaning a candle would use up all the oxygen and extinguish itself. See process below:

This Is Fine Pumpkin

The 2nd carving was a self portrait. This was once an annual tradition of mine before I started making costumes. These portraits are made using the pro pumpkin carving technique of carving partially through the surface of the pumpkin rather than cutting pieces all the way through. This allows you to get different shades by varying the amount of light that passes through, similar to how a lithophane works. In prior years, the image transfer was done by creating a stencil in Photoshop, printing it out and poking holes through the paper. This always resulted in a distorted image because it involves taking a flat image and wrapping it around a round object. This year I used a projector which allowed me to easily transfer the image without distortion from a particular angle. See process below:

Self-Portrait Pumpkin