Creech

To start, I tacked a screenshot of the Creech to the front of the pumpkin, like so. Clearly, there is a lot of subtlety of shade in the portrait, which I will have to capture in the stringy flesh of the pumpkin. First, I transfer the design through the paper using a pointy sculpting tool. Just to get to this stage consumes over an hour (for me, anyway). Transferring the design takes yet another hour to get right.

Oy! When I peel off the Creech print, the fun begins. The transfer has left a maddeningly complex maze of dotted lines. I must carefully distinguish the areas that comprise the "white" areas of the portrait from the rest of the design (you can even use a white oil pastel to mark them- you're going to carve them out, anyway), and start trimming those areas out first. But not before I rip this puppy's guts out!

This is the easiest part by far, and I don't have any special methods for it. The seeds in this pumpkin were pretty flaccid, so I didn't bother baking them. I scrape the inside of the jack where the face will be, shaving to a depth that will allow enough light through while I'm carving. Incidentally, for this kind of jack-o-lantern you have too use a light, not a candle. The one I use I ripped out of one of those cheap, Styrofoam jacks you can get at the store (but the 7 watt electric candles you can find in the Xmas section are cheaper.)

Using a variety of tools, I carefully scrape away the flesh until the glowing face matches the picture reasonably well. This is what the finished jack-o-lantern looks like close up with no light inside. After twelve hours, I felt I could go on no more. Perhaps I had been a bit too ambitious in picking the subject for my first 2002 jack. The Creech's face, I found, is quite a bit more busy than a human's face. It was taking so long, the pumpkin meat was starting to dry up while I was working on it, That's the first clue that you're in over your head on a jack.

Well, here's the product of my labors lit up proper. I'm not *too* disappointed with it, though I accidentally cut all the way through on the upper lip, and I would have liked to have had a few more hours too punch it up a bit. But once I put down a jack, I like to call it done (particularly when it's not going to be around for Halloween). The pumpkin media creates a rather distinctive effect, don't you think? To bad they don't come in Creech green!