One of my friends throws a pumpkin carving party every year, and for the most part, I try to participate in it every year I can. The impetus of the party is the belief that it’s simply nice to have traditions; and I for one could not agree any further. That being said, regardless of who, or how many people actually participate in the act of carving pumpkins, I have always taken it pretty seriously; probably to a magnitude where my effort can make up for the lack of effort on someone else’s part (I’ve carved two pumpkins a few times now).
Because I’ve had a difficult time of finding content as well as motivation of things to write in the absence of my brog, I figured I would write a little bit about my process when it comes to preparing for pumpkin carving.
For starters, I am a tryhard, and I do not care to use any generic stencils or ideas that come available in a commercially available book or website. I prefer to strive for unique ideas, or things that really hit home to my personal preferences.
This year, I got the idea for High Five Ghost from Regular Show. I know he’s more or less a secondary character behind Mordecai and Rigby, but he’s a freaking ghost with a hand sticking out of its head. Something so absurd and yet well run with, drew me to him. And naturally, Fives can’t be complete without his own bro from the show, so I decided to make a Muscle Man pumpkin as well. Frankly, I find Fives and Muscle Man’s broship more entertaining than Mordecai and Rigby’s anyway.
So, as seen above, I trace out my patterns in Illustrator. The trick is to plan ahead in advance where notches and “connections” need to remain, since due to the existence of physics, every line cannot be fully cut, with expectations that the matter within it will actually float in place. Additionally, no line can be too fine and too thin, because pumpkins are thick, and they are sometimes burdensome to cut and carve, so yeah, no thin lines, if you actually want them to show.
Eventually, they are sized and I trace them onto the pumpkins themselves.
In hindsight, I kind of wish I made them vastly larger than they ended up being, but I suppose I didn’t account for the curves and divots when I was taking my measurements. By this point, I had gone too far, and there was no time to resize, reprint and retrace everything.
And that’s all there really is to it. When the day is over, I still prefer using real pumpkins over the new-fangled trend of those who use synthetic “funkins,” because I actually find real pumpkins easier to carve, and there’s just something traditional about slicing into a pumpkin and ripping out all of its guts and seeds, throwing them all over the place.
Despite the size of the patterns in conjunction with the size of the pumpkins themselves, as I said, I wish they were a little bit bigger. But ultimately, I was happy and pleased with the way they turned out, and because I’m a tryhard, I had no problem repurposing the green lights I had from the year prior to integrate into my pumpkins this year.
