Halloween Pumpkins 2003

Dan's Dean and Bush Pumpkins

This year for Halloween I decided to actually do some pumpkin carving. What can you think of that's scarier than an evil-looking Bush? Not much! So without further ado, I present my two pumpkins:

(click for bigger version)

I'll try to get some more "natural" pics up once I've had a chance to get some candles or lights in these outside. Right now all I have is a setup where I stick a small lamp into them to get them lit up.

These are based on Joy Of Tech's Mac O' Lanterns. I followed the same basic process, some pictures of that follow. My apologies for the crudeness of this page, I just finished the second pumpkin the day before Halloween and wanted to get it online!

I did the Bush pumpkin first, so that in case I messed something up I'd have time for some education. I started off by using The Gimp (somewhat like Photoshop) to sharpen up a recent popular media photo of "beleaguered Bush", and give him some somewhat evil eyes. I then used red and green markers to trace out likely areas of white and black, taped it on the pumpkin, and used a push pin to transfer the outline to the pumpkin itself. The picture above shows the results so far.

For reference, here you see the pumpkin without the pattern, but with the pattern transferred. Yikes!

Here is the completed pumpkin, with the white areas carved out, and gray areas with the skin removed (and dug to various depths to get different shades).

Voila. Scary pumpkin!

Same deal here -- started with a pic of Dean from the photo archive on the main site, colored around the regions to cut out, and taped to the pumpkin.

The punched out pattern.

The completed pumpkin, again with white areas cut through and gray areas carved down appropriately. You can see one detail here that was not necessary with the Bush pumpkin for obvious reasons, the eye highlights. These are done with a small hand drill. I think I might have been a bit too zealous about that part, it looks a bit funny close up in the finished one.

Wow, it's The Great Pumpkin!

I hope you enjoyed this page, I sure enjoyed making these pumpkins!