How to Design a Skeleton Pumpkin
- 1). Locate a picture of a skeleton that you wish to use as the basis for your stencil. This can be a hand-drawn picture or a photograph. If you choose a photograph or picture with noticeable shading, the light should come from a single source, as this will make the pattern easier to carve. Save the picture to your computer in a format you can open with your photo-editing software.
- 2). Open the picture in your photo-editing program. Resize it to be 2 to 3 in. shorter than your pumpkin. Erase everything in the picture that you do not wish to include on your pumpkin.
- 3). Desaturate the picture to grayscale, and increase the contrast until it is as close to pure black and white as you can manage.
- 4). Posterize the image. This will reduce the number of pigments to pure black and white or to black, white and medium gray, depending on whether you want a simpler two-level pumpkin or a more difficult and detailed three-level pumpkin. The posterizing tool should be in the same section of your photo-editing program as the desaturation and contrast tools. If you don't want to bother with scraping the rind, set the number of levels to "2." If you want to have the option of scraping the rind for a more detailed, shaded pumpkin, set the number of levels to "3."
- 5). Review your pattern to make sure there are no "floating" black or gray sections. A white section represents an area where you will cut away the pumpkin, so a black or gray section surrounded on all sides by white would represent a piece of pumpkin floating in midair. If you have any floating black or gray sections, add thin, jagged lines connecting them to the nearest black or gray section. This will hold your pumpkin together and will also give your skeleton an aged look, as though it has cracks in its bones. You can do this in your photo-editing program or print the image out and use a thin marker or pen.
- 6). Invert the colors if you find a floating black section that is simply impossible to connect to any other black section -- for instance, if you need to add so many "cracks" around the skeleton's eye sockets that you think it looks silly rather than spooky. This tool will be in the same section as the others and will turn the white sections to black and the black sections to white. Draw a thin white border around your picture, and then erase small sections of it until you have enough of a border to make the picture stand out but not so much of a border that the black sections float.
- 7). Print the pattern. Adjust it by hand if you find sections you believe will be too difficult to carve. For instance, a stencil taken from a high-resolution photograph might have tiny, detailed vertebrae you do not feel comfortable carving. Color over any overdetailed sections with marker or correction fluid.
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