Happy Belated Halloween

Although we’re already a couple of days into November, I can’t let my favorite holiday just come and go without any mention of it whatsoever. That would be like winning a two brazillion dollar lottery and not telling anyone about it. Which I did once, so I’m not about to do that again.

I was very excited about having Halloween on a Saturday this year so I could actually spend some serious time on a pumpkin. Typically, the year involves an attempt to leave work early, failure at said attempt, arriving home about thirty minutes before trick-or-treating starts, then scrambling to get a good pumpkin carved.

I like carving pumpkins. (In case you missed it, here’s last year’s post on the very same topic.) As you can see, I like to at least try and be creative, which is hard to do given my lofty carving goals combined with the extremely limited amount of time involved. So imagine the heights of my anticipation, knowing I’d have an entire day to work on a pumpkin.

Ah, the best laid plans…

I actually ended up spending most of the day cleaning the house and performing other domestic type duties, such as washing dishes and ironing my underpants. Therefore, I didn’t get a-carving until around four in the afternoon. My goal was to do two pumpkins. One regular and one artificial. Now, I’d never tried one of those artificial punkies before, so I had absolutely no idea what to expect. On the upside, they are actually carvable. On the downside, there’s that pesky carpal tunnel issue.

Long story short, though, I got it carved. However I had not the strength to move on to Pumpkin #2 this year. So 2009 turned out to be a regular one-pumpkin year after all.

In case anyone’s wondering how I did it, I’ll walk you through a quick tutorial of sorts. The hardest part is just coming up with an idea. For some reason Harry Potter struck me this time around and I soon stumbled across this picture of Snape:

Once I find a candidate, I reduce it to three colors, since that’s all you get when carving: 1) all the way cut, 2) none of the way cut, 3) part of the way cut. I inspect the image to make sure there aren’t any physically impossible floaty pieces and make sure there aren’t any impossibly small strands holding up other massive pumpkin forms. If so, I make a few adjustments, where possible. Many images are simply unworkable. I got lucky on this one.

To help visualize, I change the colors to be more pumpkiny:

Now the MOST IMPORTANT part to remember is that, when carving, you’re creating a negative image. Backlighting it turns it into a positive image. So, using my trusty image editing software, I cast a color reversio spell and voila:

I print this out, tape it to the pumpkin, then take a knife to it. An X-acto knife, to be precise. First step is easy: cut out the black parts, which are the holes:

Second step is what caused my arm to suffer what’s likely to be permanent nerve damage. Next year, I’m buying a little power router to do this. Here’s how the half-way cuts turned out, and the final unlit carving:

After that, throw an electric light into it, which gives it an odd green cast to it.

I colored the initial image above orange, just to make it look normal.

Oh, and did I say just one pumpkin this year? Well, yes, for me that is. But Rachel did one too and I have to share it with you, since she got such a kick out of doing it:

And lastly, both of them together:

Can’t wait until next year!