It’s October, so that either means carving a pumpkin or making a “sexy minion” costume for myself. After considering the effect that each would have on your eyes, brain and soul, I’ve gone with pumpkins. The good news is I’ve still got more than two weeks to perfect my skills. The bad news is I’ve only carved one pumpkin before – and it was catastrophic. It looked like a face that had been iced on a cake and dropped down the stairs. Time to enlist some expert help.
David Turner is a pumpkin-carving supremo who churns out dozens of breathtakingly lifelike carvings in the weeks before Halloween. I first noticed his work on Strictly Come Dancing a few years ago; it was such a triumph that I wanted him to be my pumpkin Yoda.
David creates all his designs on Adobe Illustrator software, which I don’t have, so he suggested something more lo-fi. “Draw it freehand on paper, then tack the paper on to the pumpkin. Go around and mark every centimetre with a pin or cocktail stick, and perforate it until you’ve got the whole outline. Then it’s just dot to dot.”
Another important aspect, he said, was to find a decent pumpkin – pick one too squat and the whole thing is likely to collapse. Luckily, and completely by chance, I live near Pick Your Own Pumpkin, a vast site in Kent that is home to thousands of cheap pumpkins. Here I found the perfect canvas for my masterpiece – a huge, tall beast that fits all of David’s criteria. All that was left to do was the actual work.
So what should I carve? A ghost? Too passé. A monster? Too elaborate. Len Goodman? Too scary. In the end, I opted for a cat in a tree eating some fish bones, because witches have cats, forests are scary and fish bones are essentially skeletons. There. The perfect Halloween trifecta.
I traced my design, making sure it had enough thick branches to stop the carving from caving in. Then I hollowed the pumpkin out, which, as a veteran of scooping clumps of wet hair out of clogged shower plugholes, came naturally to me. Finally came the carving. I bought a kit from the internet, because they come with long, thin serrated knives that are perfect for detailing (although here’s something I learned: don’t buy the cheapest kit, because the knife will immediately buckle and break), and slowly traced around my dots.
The result? Well, look, there isn’t a universe in existence where this would win an award for artistry. For one, I left the walls of the pumpkin too thick, which made the whole thing look rough and amateurish. Also, I quickly realised that the fish bones were too fiddly, so I ended up lopping them off. And the cat’s neck was too thin too, so now its head droops unattractively towards the floor. But ask yourself this: what’s scarier? A normal cat or a cat that’s had its neck snapped? Either way, I still win at Halloween.
You can buy pumpkin stencils online from David Turner at pumpkd.com
