I want my pumpkin to be a hit at the Halloween party. My wife and I are tired of all the boring, generic jack-o’-lanterns. I look on the internet for ideas and I come across this article: The Craziest Pumpkin Carving Contest Ever: A blog on how we came up with the most original jack-o’-lantern.
It sounds perfect.
My wife wasn’t so sure. “Isn’t that a bit too much pumpkins?” she asked.
So I say to her, “Honey, we’ve got two children now; they’ll love it.”
And she agrees. She agrees to let me go crazy with pumpkins. We head to the store to buy our supplies.
The Craziest Pumpkin Carving Contest Ever: A blog on how we came up with the most original jack-o’-lantern.
How did we think of this idea? What led us to this amazing, creative jack-o’-lantern? This post will tell about our process and inspiration for creating the most unique pumpkin carving in the world.
It started with a vision. Our team wanted to do something really different, really amazing, really mind blowing, and really crazy. And so we started brainstorming ideas. Boy did we brainstorm! We brainstormed all day and all night–that’s how dedicated we were!
We started with a list of adjectives. We wanted our design to be crazy, but not too crazy; different, but not too different; amazing, but not too amazing. And so we went down our list of adjectives until we found that perfect word: “original.” That was it! The most original pumpkin ever seen, that was what it had to be!
It was the most original pumpkin I’d ever seen. And it won the contest.
It was a carving of a man getting ready to carve a pumpkin. The man was also carved out of a pumpkin. And if that wasn’t enough, he was carved in the shape of Michelangelo’s David.
This is how creative people think. Or at least how they think when they have to compete in an annual pumpkin-carving contest held by the design team at Automattic, the company I co-founded that makes WordPress.com and several other popular web products.
The contest started as a small tradition within our design team but has now grown into an all-company event with over 100 participants from around the world, who compete to create the best jack-o’-lanterns using only their creativity and craftsmanship.
It all started when my friend Mark decided he wanted to enter the pumpkin carving contest at the local church. He is a huge fan of the movie Night of the Living Dead and had seen some great zombie pumpkins online, but he couldn’t bring himself to carve one. The problem wasn’t the gore factor—Mark is a pretty macabre guy—it was that zombie pumpkins just weren’t original enough for him.
“I want to make something super-creative,” he said. “Something no one has ever seen before.”
So we threw out ideas. A pumpkin that looked like a vampire bat? Too basic. A pumpkin with a witch riding on it? Too clichéd. A pumpkin that looked like a pirate ship? Too ambitious. We were running out of time and getting really frustrated when I had an idea: What if we made a jack-o’-lantern that looked like myself in a pumpkin costume?
“That’s it!” Mark said excitedly. “We’ll make you into Human Pumpkin Man!”
It took us two days to complete the design, find all the right tools, and get everything set up for carving. On day three, I sat down in front of the world’s most elaborate jack-o’-lantern as
The winner, by unanimous decision of the judges, was a group of three pumpkin-carvers from Canada, who came up with a truly original idea: a pumpkin carved to look as if it had been hit by a pumpkin tossed from another direction.
Each year people all over North America try to outdo one another in their use of pumpkins as artistic canvas. Carvers have produced, among many other things, jack-o’-lanterns depicting Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein; the Mona Lisa; Snoopy and Linus; SpongeBob SquarePants; the 1990s boy band *NSYNC; and even a facial self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. But this is believed to be the first jack-o’-lantern ever made to depict an act of pumpkin violence.
The winning design is striking not only for its originality but also for its realism. The carvers achieved their effect by carving two separate pumpkins and fixing them together so that one appears to be resting on top of the other. They then cut out part of the bottom pumpkin to create a crater through which some of that pumpkin’s insides are visible–as if the force of impact had knocked some pieces off. It is easy to imagine that if you were
How to win a pumpkin carving contest:
1. Get some people together to work on the project.
2. Figure out what you want to do, and get all the materials and tools you need.
3. Carve your pumpkin, and take pictures along the way so you can show your friends how you did it later.
4. Record a video of people admiring your jack-o’-lantern.
Every year, the week before Halloween, I carve a pumpkin with my daughter. Last year we decided to step it up a notch and do an original design. It turns out that designing pumpkin faces is harder than you might think.
I first tried drawing the face in pencil on the pumpkin, but this didn’t work well because the surface of the pumpkin is not smooth. Next I tried carving a mask out of paper, but it was hard to attach this to the pumpkin.
Finally I decided to buy some modeling clay and create the face directly on top of the pumpkin. I made several different versions until I was happy with one. Then I photographed it and took the picture into Photoshop where I cleaned it up and added color to make a stencil.
Next Halloween we’ll try something even more original!