Just a quick, fun post today.  Since it is Halloween, I thought I’d get into the spirit and post a different form of my art… I think I should use pumpkins as my new medium.  I carved a Twilight pumpkin, which, yes, I know I’m not the first nor the only one to do one.  However, I can say that mine was carved based off of my own drawing.  For those of you who are artistic, here’s a little how-to: I first drew a simple drawing of the photo from the book.  No shading or detail.  Then I used orange, light orange, and yellow colored pencils to map out the positive and negative areas.  The light orange was used to mark the “gray areas” since you can carve just the outer surface of the pumpkin to get those middle tones.  I thought I could use my drawing as a template, but that was getting confusing, so I used it to cut out the major areas- ex. Bella’s cheek.  After that, I just set the drawing down by the pumpkin and used different tools to remove other areas and do the details.  I had some actual pumpkin carving tools, but those were not as sharp and precise as I needed.  So I used an X-act0 knife to do a lot of small details and a mat knife to carve into the surface.  I used a steak knife to cut out large areas.  I even used my fingernails to pick out some small parts.  Whatever does the job.  Oh, and I used a spoon to scrape over the “middle tones” and smooth them out a bit.  And that’s it.  Happy Halloween!

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