[Captions by Y Translator] Carving pumpkins is a fantastic Halloween tradition
where usually we'll carve a face into our pumpkin.
We wanted to do something like that today, but not the normal jack-o'-lanterns
face that you may be used to.
I'm going to see if I can carve mine
and Grant's faces into this pumpkin.
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[Music]
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Now, I should be up front and say this is not
in fact a real pumpkin.
This is an artificial pumpkin, mostly made of expanding foam.
It's designed to carve and cut like a normal pumpkin,
while not having to worry about whether it's going to rot.
After you've carved these, you can store them
and use them for as long as you want.
The pumpkin I'm using here is made by Funkins.
I got this one at Jo-Ann Fabrics,
but I believe they're sold in several stores.
The idea is simple.
I'll take some pictures of myself and Grant,
throw them on Photoshop,
and play with the levels until they're a good match
for what we're going for on the pumpkin,
and then try to transfer that image onto the surface of our gourd.
The first step is going to be making the photos
and editing them on Photoshop to make them look right
for this pumpkin surface.
So let's grab my computer, and see what we can do.
Now, for people who do understand the basics
of Photoshop, what I am doing for the most part is just
increasing the contrast a fair amount
and then adding a color gradient map over the Photoshop layer
so that the darkest color is approximately the color
of a pumpkin in very low light.
So a very dark orange, or almost a brownish color,
and the light is the color of a pumpkin that's carved
really thin with a light inside of it.
You can see on my gradient that it's going
from this really darkish color up through orange through yellow and
to this very whitish yellow,
and that's about the color gradient that you get when
you're actually carving a pumpkin.
Now, to simplify the design just a little bit.
I'm going to run it through this filter gallery
that just sort of gives me some edge guidelines,
and I'm not even necessarily going to follow these perfectly,
but they'll make it easier to measure, and compare to later on.
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Now, we need to print these out the same size
that we want them to be on the pumpkin,
and it may take some trial and error of growing it
and shrinking it just a little bit to see what's really going to fit best.
But we do want to print it at the actual size that
we were going to have it show up on the pumpkin.
I'm now just using scissors to cut off a lot of the extra paper,
and this is going to help us get the paper to lie as flat as it can.
Pumpkins are not flat, and the carving will not be flat.
But we do want to get the paper about as flat
as we can on to the pumpkin.
So we're just going to remove a lot of the excess,
and then we'll just sort of have to make it up a little
as we go with the rest.
Just throw a pin in here for that.
[Music]
Now these are pinned in place, and we're also going to use
the pins to do some marking.
We can't really trace through the paper onto the pumpkin.
So what we're going to do is use the pin to poke
through the pictures into the pumpkin to leave
some marks in important places.
Then after we've got those marked in, we'll go in with a Sharpie,
and maybe fill in some of the lines a little bit
more completely.
So you can see on the skin of the pumpkin that I can leave very small marks,
and they'll still show up pretty well
in the skin of the pumpkin.
So I can use that to sort of draw lines through the paper onto the skin.
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I've now gone through on my face.
I haven't yet done Grant's, but I've gone through in my face,
and I've poked holes lining a lot of the important spots,
especially what I've done is mark out all of the darkest parts.
I've sort of made an outline around that, and the reason is those parts aren't going
to get removed at all.
We're going to leave that as the skin, because the skin blocks the most light,
and we do want to have a light inside the pumpkin.
So when that shines out, the parts with the skin
will be very dark.
I've also gone through and mark some other important lines,
but those may not show up very well because the first step is going
to be to remove the skin from all of the parts that
aren't going to be dark.
And once I do that, I may not be able to see any
of those holes that I poked anymore.
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Now, I've pulled the print off, and all of the holes are still there,
but you can't see a whole lot of detail.
So it's really good to take this fine point marker,
and just go over some of those spots, and trace them out.
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We've now got all the lines drawn out for both Grant's and my face,
and it's time to start doing some carving,
and the first step is we're going to use an exacto knife to just cut along most
of those lines,
and start peeling and cutting away the skin
of the pumpkin leaving behind the orange foam behind it,
and all of the spots that are going to remain dark,
we're going to leave the skin on.
But as soon as we do that, we're going to go
into the next step which is shading, and what we do is anywhere that
needs to be lighter,
or more yellow in our prints or on the computer screen,
we need to cut farther into the foam.
So it gets even thinner, lets more light through,
and makes for a lighter color.
And the way we're actually going to do that is turn the lights down all around,
and we're going to cut a hole in the top like you do with the standard pumpkin,
and put a light inside so we can see when we're achieving
just the right amount of carving.
That way, we'll have a real time feedback system to know
if we've carved deep enough, or need to carve deeper.
[Music]
You can see inside, one of the nicest things about one
of these pumpkins is you don't have to spend a lot of time scraping it
and carving it out of the inside.
It's already carved out.
Nice and hollowed, just like we want it.
[Music]
Let's turn off all if the lights and see what that's looking like.
So now, we can see with the light inside the pumpkin, just a little bit
shines through the skin,
and it's not perfectly even because the foam on the inside
is not 100% the same thickness,
and that's very very similar to what you would run
into with an actual pumpkin.
Pumpkins aren't perfectly universally thick.
They aren't perfectly universally dense.
And so, you really get a lot of this same look with a real fruit
or with the artificial one.
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So right away, you can see the light difference between where there is
and is not the skin,
and so this is going to be sort of our base color for everything that
is not completely dark.
So we'll have the skin on in some places, and then this will be the darkest point,
and we can get lighter from there just by carving farther
and farther into the walls.
[Music]
Well, the pumpkin is finished, and I am completely
covered in pumpkin dust, which is not a thing that happens
if you use a real pumpkin,
but is a thing that happens if you use these artificial pumpkins.
[Music]
The pumpkin carving is complete, and now that I have vacuumed myself off,
and am no longer covered in the dust from this,
we can talk about what we've done.
I am very happy with how this turned out.
Even though I've done stuff like this before,
it's always a little nerve-wracking.
Like, oh, is it going to work this time?
This as it is took me five or six hours to do.
But it is not a very quick process overall.
So it might be something you want to give yourself a day
or two to work on.
I do want to talk about the difference
between artificial pumpkins and real pumpkins when you're carving.
They both have some advantages and disadvantages.
Where I live at least, real pumpkins are way cheaper.
This thing was on sale 40% off, and still cost 30 bucks.
A pumpkin even one this size where I live would only be maybe 12,
and if you wanted to practice, then smaller pumpkins are really cheap,
like two or three bucks for a decent-sized pumpkin.
That's not true everywhere.
Some places, pumpkins are more expensive,
but I would say for practicing, a real pumpkin's much better.
This of course will last indefinitely, unless someone breaks it,
which is possible.
There are lots of kids who live at this house.
Carving real pumpkins and artificial pumpkins is different.
Just about any tool that you can scrape with will do an okay job
for carving a real pumpkin.
This foam has a very different texture.
If you try and just scrape at it, it roughs it up,
but it doesn't really carve anything away.
So you probably saw that by far the most
useful tool for me was a rotary tool.
This thing just spins and with a slightly rough
or drill like tip on it, it does a really good job
of just cutting through the foam,
and all you need is a steady hands to just
take off exactly what you want, and go over it slowly,
taking away little bits at a time.
A real pumpkin is usually a little bit more yellow than this.
These pumpkins have this foam, which is slightly yellow,
but a little bit white, at least for now.
It's possible that if you left it out in the sun for a while,
it would turn more yellow.
So you're going to get a slightly different effect when you put a candle
or a light inside it.
We've been using an artificial light because there's no air flow and,
we don't want to burn our pumpkin down.
With a real pumpkin, with holes that
you've carved into it, normally, a real candle will do a great job.
Not a good plan for urethane pumpkins.
I also really loved how nonsensical it looks when you're looking
at it with external light and no internal light.
It barely looks like it's people at all, and you definitely can't really
tell what's going on,
and it's fun to watch how much that changes
when you take down the external lights, and light it up from the inside.
Guys, I love jack-o'-lanterns.
I love seeing all the artwork.
So whether you use this tutorial, this style or not,
I want to see what you've carved.
Post your jack-o'-lantern on Instagram, and tag us @TheKingofRandom.
I want to see what you've got.
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