Glorious Halloween Remi

It seems my shipment from Amiami regarding Remilia hasn’t arrived yet. Change of plans, change of plans. Nevertheless I was insistent on pairing up the Halloween idea with Remi.

Mischievous grin you've got there.

It’s my first time carving a pumpkin, actually.

This project took me a good couple of hours getting this done. My brother initially wanted a really simple pattern that was simply taking out huge chunks out of the pumpkin by making big incisions. I didn’t settle for that,  and I wanted to really push what I could, even though it’s my first time.

Since I was pressed for time, I took a few modifications to ANGELTYPE’S depiction of Remilia in the Queen of Cat doujin cover (some other person’s auction of the item here, for the interested). It could have been another pattern, but I was insistent on working hard for the pumpkin.

After all, I got motivated by the pumpkin carving examples seen on Wired. You could see in the examples that they were able to get several levels of tone by playing around by how much of the pumpkin surface was shaved away. I immediately got the sense of that, but my brother really didn’t get that part at all, and he was all about just cutting out big chunks or furrowing.

Since I’m wasn’t able to faithfully reproduce the ANGELTYPE design because of size constraints, I had to do some modifications, such as changing the hat shape to remove the cat ears, expanding the mouth size, giving full form to the wings, and simplifying some of the clothing detail.

Several wood carvers, an x-acto knife, and an olfa knife. The olfa was before I switched to the more precise x-acto.

The method I used to plot down points was to print out the pattern on paper, and then stick pins through several reference points throughout the drawing. while the paper was bent and stretched. With a 4B pencil, I traced the lines and made corrections to create the gentle curves needed.

The next thing I did was to  take a bunch of wood carving tools and an x-acto knife. The wood carving tools were for taking out big chunks of the pumpkin and shaving away the pulp.  One of the wood carvers was good for instantly making lines and furrows in order to create the body outlines and some of the finer details.The x-acto knife was for fine filleting away of layers including the outer skin. Peeling away layers gradually would take advantage of the varying degrees of translucency of the pulp when a light source is placed inside.

At times, I would carve with the lights out and a candle lit inside the pumpkin so I’d be guided to how deep I’d shave away the pulp and see how some of the 3d-illusion would turn out (particularly the hat).

The pumpkin set outdoors. Don't you just appreciate the little details that come out from the carving?

There’s bigger versions of the photos available on Flickr.

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Tags: ANGELTYPE, carving, halloween, halloween 2009, lantern, layering technique, night photography, pumpkin, remilia, remilia scarlet, sculpting, touhou

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