Pumpkins

Personal Project - Pumpkins carved to commemorate actors & musicians that have died each year

Main Materials: Pumpkins, knives, lino cutting tools

Techniques: Pattern creation, scultping, photoshop editing

Having spent a portion of my childhood living in Canada, carving pumpkins was a tradition that I grew up with and continued to do after moving back to the UK. After paying to download stencils from specialist sites, I began experimenting with creating my own stencils of images from film, TV and video games. In 2016, several beloved and influencial celebrities died so I decided to carve them as pumpkins for Halloween in remembrance, which started an annual tradition.

The stencils begin by converting an image to black & white. Using photoshop, the image is “posterized” to leave only 3 colours; black, white and grey, with clear boundaries between them.

White: cut out as holes in the pumpkin to let full light through
Grey: pumpkin skin scraped away using a lino scraper so that light partially comes through creating shading
Black: left alone, with the pumpkin skin on
The brightness and exposure often need to be adjusted to get a usable stencil. As long as there are no black areas floating in a white area, the stencil is useable.

Once the stencil is usable, it’s stuck to the pumpkin that’s been hollowed out. To transfer the pattern to the punpkin, a pin is used to go over every border line between each colour. When all of the lines have been pinned over, the stencil is removed and talcum powder is sprinkled over the skin to make the pin holes visible so the lines can be drawn over with a marker ready to be carved. Below is a picture of some of the tools I use. The drill and drillbit is specifically for gutting out the pumpkin. The Vaseline is to apply to the cut parts of the pumpkin. It helps the pumpkin to retain moisture and last longer.