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By eHow Holidays & Celebrations Editor
Jolly jack-o'-lanterns are a traditional welcome for trick-or-treaters, an invitation to stop by for a Halloween surprise. It's also something you can make with the leftovers you can't use for Halloween cooking. Just remember that carving a pumpkin takes more tenacity than skill.... Read full How To Article
stengb
published this on
October 27, 2009
My wife and I have gotten great enjoyment out of carving pumpkins for Halloween the last couple of years. So, after the birth of our son in April, I wanted to do something special for Halloween this year. I thought about a pumpkin with his name on it, or with a toy truck carved into it, or possibly just an "Its a Boy" theme. Ultimately,...
I got started looking through the hundreds of photos I had taken thus far. I wanted the cutest mug shot I could find to carve into his pumpkin. It wasn't as hard as it sounds, though, as I had a pretty good idea of the picture I was going to use. He has many cute pictures, but one in particular stood out as the winner. It is a picture of him with a smile on his face that could melt the hardest of hearts.
After finding the perfect picture, I had to figure out how to get it from picture to pumpkin. I opened it up in some photo editing software, and got to work manipulating until I had a design that could be transfered to a pumpkin. I printed the final template, taped it to the pumpkin, and poked holes through the template to transfer the design to the pumpkin.
Then, the fun part was carving the pumpkin. I mostly used regular pumpkin carving utensils, a scoop, a punch, and a carving saw, except for the more detailed areas - I used a fine toothed coping saw blade for them.
The pumpkin turned out better than I imagined. Not only can you tell it is a baby, but it resembles my baby pretty well, too. I am proud to light the candle and set the pumpkin on my porch. It gets frequent compliments, and after taking pictures, I now have something to remember my baby's first Halloween.
Here is the final result of my baby boy's pumpkin for his first Halloween.
This is the photo that I started with.
I then cropped the photo to just his face and and increase the contrast so to have more of an outline.
Next, I adjusted the color saturation to where I could simply use the dark areas as the template for my pumpkin.
The template I created after tracing the dark areas on the picture.
Here is the final result of my baby boy's pumpkin for his first Halloween.
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tmoneko said