Tuesday, October 27, 2015

The Slacker's Guide to Pumpkin Portraits

Happy Almost Halloween!  In a complete deviation of the purpose of this blog, I wanted to document the steps I took to create my Bernie Sanders jack-o-lantern, minimal as the likeness might be.  I call this the "slacker's guide" because this is pretty much the bare minimum you can do if you're ambitious with your pumpkin plans but not a gifted artist.  Here's the final product, along with our beloved presidential hopeful it's supposed to resemble:


Twins, right?  I originally had the idea to do Donald Trump, but that was way too scary.  If I had to spend several hours looking at a mug, I much prefer Bernie's.  I did some research into how to carve detailed faces on pumpkins, and it required skills at Photoshop or the equivalent, so I fiddled around with doing it without these.

STEP 1: Choose a photo.  One where the subject is front on, not looking to the side at all (unless just his/her eyeballs are, like Bernie here).

STEP 2: Prep it.  Your goal is to make a stencil where the dark areas are black, the light areas are white, and everything else is gray, with high contrast.  Upping the contrast to make the darks black enough adds shadows to other features, like the eyes, at which point you use Photoshop to fix that.  But I don't have the software or skills, so I decided to render it semi-stenciled and do the rest manually.  I did use iPhoto and Sumo Paint online for basic edits.

I got a photo off the internet...



Cropped it...

Made it black and white...

and upped the contrast to the maximum...

But this wasn't contrast-y enough.  So I saved this image to my desktop, imported it to iPhoto again to get a fresh start, then increased the contrast a second time.


I still wasn't satisfied with the contrast, so I re-imported it again.  Upped the contrast more, and this time I upped the exposure too to make the whites whiter.  


STEP 3: Remove excess black background.  This is only if you care about saving printer ink.  If you have MS Paint, you're good to go.  I do not, sadly, so I used an online photo editor called Sumo that did the trick.  Go to Sumo Paint, and click "Try Online."  Go to File, Open from My Computer, and get your image up.

Oops!  Bernie grew a mole on his noggin.
Go to the Eraser tool, then choose your ideal shape.  I went with Diamond.  On the right, make sure to change the color to white (unless you really need to use up cyan printer ink or something).  I also recommend increasing the diameter of your erasing tool.


Erase away the background so you can print just your subject's face!  Make sure to leave a border so you can tell where noggin ends and abyss begins.


When you're done click File, Save to Cloud, and after a bazillion seconds it'll show it huge on the next page.  I simply right clicked on the image and chose "Save Image."


Step 3: Print it!  I opened the picture with a Google Doc, shrunk it a little bit to fit my pumpkin, and printed from there.

Step 4: Blacken the blacks.  The idea is that you have extreme areas of black (uncarved pumpkin) and white (carved away pumpkin), and anything in the middle you will partially carve away but leave some pumpkin flesh intact.  It is important that you cannot have "islands" of black, since the face needs to support itself, so find a way to have all black parts connected.  I used a Sharpie to enhance my black areas.

Looking more and more like FDR!
Optional: cover the print-out with a blank sheet of paper against a window and trace the black.  If it's recognizable, you're good to go.


Then you're ready to carve!  Cut out your face and tape it to your hollowed out pumpkin.


Use a pin to make a dotted outline of expanses of white, through the paper, into the pumpkin.


Peel the stencil back, and cut out those areas.  I used an X-acto knife for the detail work.


Keep doing this down the face.  I cut each area smaller than it needed to be, since more can always be carved.


After I got most of the white cut, I just eyeballed the rest, comparing it to the print-out I had.  I found it helped to remove just the outer skin on areas I wanted to be non-black, then you can alter the depth of the cuts based on how light that part should be.


I decided it was "finished," but it didn't look right.  So I reduced some of the black spots and added more hair.  It was supposed to have a curved line on the left side of his forehead to separate hair from head, but it fell off.  Oops!


I recommend going into a dark bathroom and checking how it looks often.  Here's the finished product by day...


And by night...


Happy carving!

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