Quick and Easy Alternative to Carving Those Pumpkins!

Some of you have requested tutorials on how Wenchkin carves her pumpkins. If you have ever SEEN her carvings, you would know why. She is pretty much the master. You can find her pumpkin gallery here . Well this week, she shows up an easy alternative to "carving" to help make your pumpkins last!

  I know, every year I get too excited, carve too many too early only to have them rot before halloween. So I am not going to give you my pumpkin carving tips and tricks just yet. That will be next week. What I suggest for this week is painting your pumpkin.

  Now you could paint anything that tickles your fancy in whatever color you want using the same techniques and materials I outlined in my how to paint toys post. For this I stuck the pumpkin in the sink, gave it a good wash and dried it off.
  Many people ask me about pumpkin carving patterns. I myself being an artist do not use them, I freehand an idea on with a sharpie and go from there. For this however I am going to pretend that like everyone else I want to use a pattern. I drew one out quickly that I will be using for this post.



So pretending this is your pattern you ripped out of your pumpkin pattern book or printed off the internet, the next thing is usually to transfer your pattern to the pumpkin. First, I HATE the hole poking method, I understand the concept of connect the dots but I personally think it makes for sloppy lines. So I never do that. I would first opt for carbon paper to transfer my design. If you can not get carbon paper I suggest cheating it and kinda making your own.

I am taking my drawing here flipping it over and shading the whole back in pencil



It is going to take more then this, I go back over it two more times in different directions.
I then cut the excess paper off down to a half an inch around the outside of the design just to have it out of my way then I position on the pumpkin.
Before taping it down I do a little folding work. I am sure you noticed paper is flat and a pumpkin is not so I try to fold up the excess paper in places of the design that do not matter as much trying to keep the lines properly lined up before I tape it all down.



Since I faked carbon paper I am actually going to take a pencil and trace around all of these lines but as I do it I am going to push the pencil into the paper with a little force so I actually kind of etch the outline into the pumpkin under it.

This is hard to photograph but what I am left with after I take the paper off is a faint pencil line inside a groove.



Then I take a cheap black acrylic paint and start filling it in.



When I am done I have what looks like a pumpkin pattern on my pumpkin.



This can now sit on my porch for a few weeks till it gets closer to halloween.
When the time comes all I am going to do it pick it back up and cut out all the black parts.
And I will be back with that blog to show you what it looks like.

But for now I think it looks cute sitting on my porch like this.

We want to see YOUR pumpkin artwork!!!  Head on  over to the Modern Rosies fan page later today, to find out how you win some cool prizes!!

Wenchkin is our resident guerrilla artist, and queen of all that is awesome. You can find her here on Google+, or on her fan page. To shop in her shop, visit her Artfire shop!