So I’m watching all these Food Network Halloween shows: Halloween Baking Championship, Haunted Gingerbread, and Halloween Wars, and I start thinking about pumpkin sculpting. I’ve never tried it, and the artists in Halloween Wars do amazing things. Then I saw “Outrageous Pumpkins” and I just HAD to try it.
I’ve carved pumpkins many times, and I even tried carving an artificial pumpkin, but I’ve never tried sculpting one. I’ve never really even whittled more than a pointed stick. I did a bit of research, and watched a video of Martha Stewart failing at it (really gives you confidence, right?)
Clay sculpting tools 
inspiration 
scraping 
mess!
What you need:
- a fresh, sturdy pumpkin, preferably one heavy for its size
- clay sculpting tools (they are metal loops on handles)
- a place to work that can get messy
- reference material (a sketch, photo, someone’s face, a mirror…)
- patience
- a curious mixture of exactness and fatalism used by ephemeral artists such as ice carvers, sand sculpture makers and butter artists
Carving is negative space, reductive art, where you are taking away what doesn’t belong. You can’t put things back, and if you break through to the hollow middle, you’ve ruined your work. Unless you’ve got a bucket of shellac it’s going to be slushy by Thanksgiving anyway. I could see this craft completely breaking a perfectionist’s soul. I think because I was just playing around it was fun.
The first step is to scrape off the skin, using the large sculpting scraper. Then refer to your reference material to see where the face’s brow ridge is. Lightly scrape that in, and establish where the nose ends. A little bit at a time, scrape around the highest points of the face- the brow, the nose, the chin, the cheekbones. I decided to make my eyes bulge (my inspiration was a goblin from the movie Labyrinth) and make a oversized mouth. I tried to make fangs, but didn’t think through how they would protrude up from the bottom to the top, so I got rid of them.
Here’s my completed piece. I’m not going to be competing on the Food Network any time soon, but it was fun. Closer to Halloween I will gut it from the bottom and put in a light (mostly so we can have the oh-so-tasty seeds).
Afterward, I helped my son make a traditional jack-o-lantern, and I prefer that style. And the seeds for snacking on.
