13 Levels of Pumpkin Carving: Easy to Complex

Pumpkin carving master James Hall explains pumpkin carving in 13 spooky levels of difficulty. The 2-time 'Halloween Wars' winner breaks down a variety of pumpkin carving techniques, ranging from simple to incredibly complex.

Video Transcript

JAMES HALL: My name is James Hall. I'm a pumpkin carver. I have won Halloween Wars twice and a number of online contests.

Today, I've been challenged to explain pumpkin carving in 13 levels of increasing complexity.

Pumpkin carving is kind of a realm where a lot of skill is required. There's a lot of craft that you have to learn the further you get into it. And you're on the clock, because as soon as you cut into that pumpkin, it's starting to rot. So you learn to let go of the things that you worked hard at.

What we're going to be creating here today are just the designs that I brought. No design is really better or worse than another. This is my interpretation of the challenge.

Level 1, basic Jack-o'-Lantern. It's just the two triangle eyes, a simple mouth, maybe a nose if you're feeling really, really fancy.

I'm choosing this pumpkin because it's just got that classic shape. When you see illustrations of Jack-o'-Lanterns on little posters or Halloween, cards they all look like this. First, I'm going to go ahead and cut the top off so I can get to all the guts inside. Do not cut straight down. You want to go in at an angle to cut that lid, because if you go straight up and down, you'll put the pumpkin lid on there, and it'll just drop all the way through.

This is just like the little basic plastic pumpkin scoop you get with the pumpkin carving kits. If you don't have one of these, a spoon will work. Then you just start off by drawing what you want to carve into the pumpkin. Any kind of washable felt tip marker will work. If you don't like it, you take a wet paper towel and start over again.

Then you will go ahead and cut the facial details out. And you're going to be cutting all the way through the pumpkin wall. I prefer fillet knives, because if you use a knife that's a bit too hefty, when you're cutting, it'll grip. And then when you pull out, all of a sudden, it'll pop free, which is a good way to accidentally cut pieces off the pumpkin and your finger.

Easy mistakes to make-- placement of the facial features. Take a step back. Otherwise, you end up carving an eye and realizing that your second eye is an inch lower and twice as big, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Pumpkins are supposed to be monstrous and ugly anyway. You can do the classic artist thing and lie and say you did something on purpose because you're a genius.

This is the classic Jack-o'-Lantern. Cut the top off make, sure to go to an angle. Scoop it out really good. Then you just cut the two eyes, the nose, and the mouth, and that's it.

Level 2, embellished Jack-o'-Lantern. The important thing to remember, when you're adding embellished details-- paying attention to what a face actually does. Not just a plain triangle for an eye, but adding maybe some creases in the corner to show one eye squinting. Varying the size to show one eye is more open. So what I'll do first is go ahead and raise the corner of the mouth, follow the line you already established. You can even come back, carve in the corners. That way, you get that crease that you get at the corner of your mouth when you smile really big.

Next, I want to give this eye a little bit of a crease here to make it look like it's squinting slightly from the smile. Actually, bringing the eye outward a little, give it a little bit of a curve. Next to make this I look like it's actually shut a little bit more than this one, this eye has to be expanded. Another thing you can do is modify the nose just a tiny bit, because as with everything else, when your face does something big like smile, your nose will change just a tiny bit. Just a bit of a Sneer

Don't forget, if you're carving a pumpkin, there's more than one side. If you mess that up, turn it around, start again, turn that side to the wall when you light it. A really good way to play with any Jack-o'-Lantern is just add more teeth. I find that's a good answer for pretty much any monster design. And there you have very slightly embellished Jack-o'-Lantern. It's the same thing as the first, just with a tiny bit more character.

For level 3, what we're doing is actually trying to make a representation of an image on the pumpkin. Level three, realistic pumpkin. Instead of just carving a triangle and saying that's an eye, you're going to be carving the shapes that light makes when it bounces off an object. It's kind of like the difference between having a piece of paper and drawing a Smiley face on it, and then having a piece of paper and printing out a photograph on it. Start by drawing the image on the pumpkin. Even for people that have been doing this a long time, that is always a good step.

This design is going to be kind of a classic European dragon. They're good for Halloween, because they're the angry version of a dragon. One of the other things you have to draw up with the marker first is highlights. Pick a source. If you have a face and the light is supposed to be coming from the right side, you're going to be carving out like a spot here and a spot here. Even if it's something imaginary, light still bounces off pretty much the same way.

Then cut the top off. Since this pumpkin is bigger, it's going to be a lot thicker. This is a drywall saw. You can get it at any hardware store. This thing goes through pumpkin incredibly well, so it'll take the top off very easily.

Once again, let's get everything out of there. You're going to have to be a little bit more persistent with it. You want to try to get the pumpkin wall nice and smoothed out and even.

Next thing we're going to do is start carving some of the highlights out of this pumpkin. If you've drawn on here with the marker, there's a good chance that while you're working on it, it'll automatically erase a lot of the marker lines. Pumpkin juice is really good at taking ink off.

What I'm doing now is going in and putting in a little bit of an outline. You want to make sure that you don't carve an outline in an unbroken line all the way around the piece, because then there's nothing but this tiny bit here supporting all this pumpkin hanging out there. You really have to make sure that you build in little support systems in here.

The tip of the horn doesn't necessarily have to be showing. It's implied-- you know it's there. Same thing with the tongue. That's the whole reason that tongue is there in the first place. Otherwise, the pumpkin is almost certainly going to break on you.

Now this is at an early stage. It's almost an abstraction of a dragon. The more detail you add to it, the more pronounced it's going to get. So the next steps, you're going to start to see this thing take shape a lot more.

Level 4, adding a background. This level is much more complex, because by adding a background, you're telling more of a story. And it takes a lot more thought and possibly a few more tricks like perspective. And you want to make sure that when you draw your background, you account for the connection spots. You want to make sure those lines connect into that. So you still maintain that kind of support.

Then you just go ahead and cut out whatever it is you've decided on. At this point, you really want to be using like a fine saw if you're trying to get this kind of detail. The main thing is take your time. Remember, the more you cut away, the more flimsy the pumpkin becomes.

This thing is round. So it's an organic shape, it'll display organic shapes more easily. For the dragon, I'm going to put them in a cave a hallway or a room. That involves carving straight lines. Problem is if you try to carve a straight line across the pumpkin, from certain angles, it will always look like it's bent. With an organic background, you get a little more room to play with. You can view it from over here or over here, and it still looks essentially the same.

Now you can see with a level 4, by adding a background, it really makes the detail pop on this, because you've got contrast of the dark shape here with the bright background. And some of the later levels, we can go in and add a little bit of detail in a little bit of definition, because right now, this is still a very simplified version of this scene.

For the next level, let's increase the detail. Level 5, layered carving. You want to get the most out of whatever image that you've chosen. And to do that, you really need to work with more than just black and white. The outer rind of a pumpkin is opaque-- that's what blocks the light. If you shave off just that dark layer of skin, the pumpkin meat underneath is actually translucent. You put a light behind it, it will still show through. You'll have a nice range of shades you can go through. The deeper you carve, the brighter it gets.

I'm going to start off by working on the dragon itself. I want to make sure that I get all the highlights right where I want them to be. And any place where there's going to be a really dark section, you can just leave the rind on that surface. Whereas with a regular sculpture, where you carve in, that's where the shadow is going to be, it's reverse. You're essentially carving in negative. You now have to find the right tool and just shave off different layers of the pumpkin.

These are ones that I've made myself and it's just a bristle from a street sweeper that came off. Oddly enough, these things are made of really, really good high carbon steel, so they actually sharpen up and last better than the store-bought ones. And then just a stick. I think this used to be part of a Christmas tree. Obviously, this will cut out round shape, whereas this one will give you a nice sharp line.

You can't just go to the art store and buy a little pack of loop tools. You probably are going to have to sharpen them up first, because you need something with a good edge to go through a pumpkin. It's very fibrous, and it'll like to rip apart and fray.

Now I've finished with this level. So I've added a little bit more detail to the face, added scales, highlighted the teeth, and gave the background a little bit more definition. But I'm sure we can get a bit more detail in this. So let's move on to the next level.

Level 6, back carving. We're adding complexity to this by carving on the inside. It's a tricky technique, because you're carving without being able to see exactly what you're doing. So you're essentially working blind. I'm going to be using this technique on the dragon to highlight the top of the neck, because it's going to be covered in scale detail. And once that's in there, it's a lot easier to go in and do large-scale highlight from the back than it is to try to go in and carve out each individual little scale that I think needs to be brighter.

The details I'm trying to highlight are the areas where the light would be strongest. Eye sockets and cheekbones and jaw lines. Those are things that we look at and it helps us read it face just a little bit faster.

For this level, you want to leave the light on, especially if you don't have any areas that are cut out and it's just solid with a bit of the rind shaved off. You really want to have that light on, because then your best guess is going to be based the shadow that you see through the surface.

You're working on a surface that's curved around your hand. It's a concave surface. With a chisel or a gouge, those tools will go forward and then dig out. And if the piece is bending away from it, that works really well. If it's bending into it, it's a lot harder to get that to curve. So loop tools are a better way to go.

And now that we're done, you can see the highlights along the scales, any place where the light is supposed to hit it, and a little bit along the mouth to define it. A bit along the horn and the cheekbones. If you're doing a detailed piece, the easiest way to go ahead and hack off a lot and give you really strong highlights and broad areas is just to go through the back and carve it out after you've fleshed out the details. If you've done it right, you should end up with a pumpkin that you're pretty happy with. If not, you end up with something that you can throw in your neighbor's yard.

Next, we're going to move into a new pumpkin to show you some more complex levels of pumpkin carving. Level 7, three-dimensional carving.

3-D carving is carving the pumpkin like you're sculpting a piece of stone or carving a piece of wood. You really have to know the object in three dimensions. If you're carving a face, you need to know about how far the nose comes out from the face, how deep the eyes sink in. Shadow is going to form just due to the way that light falls on this actual object now. It can be very much equal to or for some people, easier to do. But this is going to draw on skills that most people have never used when carving a pumpkin.

First, you want to make sure you get the rind off so you have a nice blank Canvas to work with. I'm choosing to carve a monster into this pumpkin pretty much because of the shape of this pumpkin. Because this has this nice knob here. That very easily becomes a head. Places where it's flat are where the pumpkin is at its thinnest. Flat parts lends itself well to lit carving. Curvier it is, more lends itself to sculpting.

The next step is to sketch out a basic design not with a marker but, with the end of loop tool. Since you're going to be carving all these details back further, any lines that you make here are going to disappear anyway. I'm carving and taking meat out here to create a shadow underneath something. Whereas with carving, I'm carving that meat out to create a highlight.

As you're carving into the pumpkin, you want to feel every once in a while how soft the pumpkin is. Once you really start to get through the pumpkin wall, it'll give a little bit more and you'll be able to feel the fibers of the pumpkin. And you know that you don't want to carve any deeper into that area.

This is a foam rasp. You can find that in any hardware store. And this will take off its small layers at a time. The curve under the cheekbone that goes down into the jawline, this is an excellent tool to get that nice little curve. Because sometimes, you put a loop tool in there and drag it, and it's going to take off a bit more than you want.

Now this little tool is good for getting very fine detail. And as the sculptor goes on, you're going to progress from larger tools down to smaller ones. You want ones that pop some of the actual little pieces out. And if you remember with the embellished Jack-o'-Lantern, I turned the corner up to give it more of a sneer. And you could tell that's what's going on here. The same idea is of observation and memorizing exactly what the corners of the mouth do. That being said, this is a totally different process. You have to use loop tools to carve out where the eyes are and then recess them and sculpt them out exactly how you want them to look.

Going into the next level, we're going to be using the whole form of this pumpkin to kind of describe this scene, as opposed to the previous pumpkins, where we just been using a single side.

Level 8, sculpting a background. Adding a background is going to be very different than the background we added in the previous levels. You're cutting into the pumpkin as much as you can to push the background back, but not so deep that you're cutting all the way through the pumpkin.

The tools we're going to be using are going to be the same as the previous step. Now what I'm doing with this is kind of letting the pumpkin dictate what exactly should be carved. By that I mean I'm just kind of paying attention to the natural shape of it. Because of this bulge here and the way it sticks out, it automatically makes me think of a shoulder.

You have to take the whole thing into account pretty much at all times. At the very least until you get everything basically roughed out, you really can't focus in on one small spot. What I'm doing right now is trying to separate the head from the background of the pumpkin. And by doing that, I'll also help define the shoulder a little bit.

That foam rasp is going to become very important, because one of the easiest ways to uniformly push back that pumpkin wall so the subject stands forward is to take that rasp and just keep shaving down and shaving down, and do it a little bit at a time. It can be a bit tedious, but it's better to do that than to accidentally punch all the way through the pumpkin.

You don't even have to go all the way through, but you could hit a layer of pumpkin that is almost uncarvable. It will be very, very fibrous and very loose. And as soon as you try to pull a tool across it, it'll just fray and break apart. That gives you an idea of what you're trying to do when you make a background. Adds a little bit more to our guy here, including a nice little tattoo, he's a monster, but he loves his mom.

And as you can see with a three-dimensional background, it allows you to appreciate the pumpkin for more than one angle. With the classic pumpkin, you are pretty much restricted to viewing it from one point of view.

Next, we're going to increase the complexity by taking pieces of the pumpkin and adding it to the outside of the pumpkin. Level 9, adding additional pieces.

It can be very tricky to do this. Instead of just a foreshortened hand, you actually have a hand coming out from the pumpkin. The first thing I'm going to do is cut off some pieces of pumpkin from the back. All that back that you're not using, that's raw materials. You can use super glue, which works surprisingly well, especially for small pieces. Or for larger pieces, you're going to want to use dowel rods to give the extra piece a bit of support and sink it in. It becomes very breakable, so it's not only something to sink into the pumpkin to keep it in place. A dow rod is also there to reinforce the piece that you're attaching.

At this point, I've got the two small horns shaped. It's a lot easier to shave something down when it's in one whole piece. I've waited to separate them until the end. Pumpkin is always going to be extremely slippery. And you're using sharp tools, often ones like a rasp that you're often drawing towards you. The tinier the piece, the more of a pain that's going to be to work with.

And now I've got a car into where I'm going to rest the horns. This is for a couple of reasons. One, because you want to sink the pumpkin in there so it really looks like it is part of the piece. And two, if you have a little part where it rests in it, it secures better. And these things don't have to be absolutely perfect. Remember, he is a monster.

Now for the gluing process, size up the horns against the head again. Really make sure that it fits well. And now you've got a monster with horns. It's something that it's not truly a huge change, but it definitely adds something, just a little bit more. I wonder what else we could put on there.

Level 10, 3-D carving with lights. In this pumpkin, I'm going to be adding some light to the eyes. It's going to be different than adding light to the pumpkins that we did in earlier levels, because we no longer have the rind to block that light from coming out. Remember, you shaved off the opaque part of it, so the whole pumpkin may light up.

The area that I want lit on this is his eye. That seems like a really cool effect. To do that, I need to get to the back of the eye. Easiest way to do that is that hole that I just cut for the horns-- I'm going to use the saw, widen it out a little bit. And you can see now I can reach my hand in there. You're going to get some gunk all over your arm, but that happens. It's pumpkin carving.

Now what I'm going to do here is reach into the loop tool and shave the back of the eye down just a little bit. I do want to make a nice flat spot where I can attach that light. If I push on the pumpkin, I can get a little bit of an idea of where I'm at.

To make this light more precise, I need to narrow down its beam a little bit. So for that, I'm going to be using aluminum foil to block a good part of it. Just cut the tiniest hole in it so you can really make that light go exactly where you want it to. And you can see how much it's refocused that beam.

Put the light in this little wire bracket that I've made, and it'll just stick in place. OK, that works out pretty well.

For classic Jack o' lanterns and some of the previous pumpkins we've carved, light is necessary. It's the thing that makes that Jack-o'-Lantern work. For this light, it's more of an accent piece. A fun thing to add on top of everything else. Because what doesn't look cool with glowing eyes.

Level 11, using multiple pumpkins. This level increases in complexity just by using more materials. You typically have a core pumpkin and then kind of a sacrificial pumpkin that is there for spare parts so you can cut pieces off and add it. And that's what we're going to be doing here.

First, I'm going to draw out exactly what I want on the side of that pumpkin. It's an example of how each level builds on the skills that you learned in the previous levels. And now just cut it out with my saw.

Right now, I'm using the rasp to just round off those edges. I don't really want to take anything off the back. All I'm doing is taking that sharp corner off, because it'll look just a little bit better without that. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. This guy is a monster, but he's kind of a cartoon looking monster. So it's more fun to keep him slightly silly looking.

The next step is to make sure that these fits exactly how I want them on the core pumpkin. Using big pieces, that's when you start to get into the realm of armature and having things really lock into place. And these are just barbecue skewers you can find pretty much anywhere. You go to the grocery store and you could find these things.

The skewers are going to go from the wing and stick all the way into the base of the pumpkin. Since this wing is a bit more out than the other wing is, it's a bit more resistant to staying put.

I went ahead and attached them so they weren't even, because he's positioned so one shoulder is raised and the other one is coming down. Typically, creatures like us, we don't stand perfectly rigid and exactly the same on either side. And apparently, neither do monsters. Now I'm not going to add any more pieces of pumpkin to this, but I'm going to do one last thing to add one more level of complexity, and just pop up the details just a tiny bit more.

Level 12, painting the pumpkin. We've done a great deal of sculpture and work on this thing. Paint is a great way to accent all that hard work to really make it stand out. Personally, I like to only add a little bit of shadow to get some accent in there, because I like people to really see that no, that's-- that's pumpkin. Even though with the details carved into it, you get these nice dark spots. Pumpkin is light and it is translucent, so it doesn't necessarily give you these nice defined shadows quite as defined as you might want them to be.

I personally prefer using an airbrush. I know that's a tool that a lot of people don't have. It's kind of a specialty device. But you can use your acrylic paint and a little brush and get some color in there.

It is a very wet surface. Don't be surprised if you come back an hour later and you put your hand on it and the paint just comes off on your hands, because it's not really going to dry on this. Don't worry about the noise-- that's just the airbrush compressor pumping itself back up. That's actually pretty quiet for an airbrush compressor.

And now this is our finished pumpkin, handsome as he is. Our completed pumpkin really builds on everything that we've learned so far in the previous levels. Once you've learned how to sculpt in three dimensions, you really have to nail that realism at every angle. We've added additional pieces to the outside of the pumpkin. We've used light to create accents. We've incorporated multiple pumpkins to build this piece up. And finally, we've actually used some paint to really punch up some detail and add shadow.

Level 13, pushing the limits. At this point, what we're doing is basically just completely showing off. You're taking the pumpkin and using it not as a pumpkin really, anymore, just as raw materials. You're often taking it and turning it into something that no longer resembles pumpkin at all. You're using what you learned in terms of sculpture, in terms of thickness of the pumpkin and how sturdy it is, and attaching it together.

The design that I've got for this level is the upper torso of a pumpkin zombie. Now I've got this steel armature that I've built covered in wire and mesh, and I'm going to be taking pieces of a pumpkin and layering it on to that armature. You can't build an armature out of just like, PVC pipe and a dowel rod if you're going to be stacking a lot of pumpkin on it. You need steel and you need heavy amounts of wood to make sure it can hold.

The other problem is those heavy pieces of pumpkin, they break, the slide off. Pumpkin is slippery and does all sorts of stuff. So you have to figure out a way to anchor it to that frame. And I've also got servos mounted inside of the head. So we'll be putting pumpkin on top of that, and hopefully, it'll move once it's all done. It's trying to do everything that none of these materials want to do.

Level 13, breaking every rule. I based it off of zombie movies that I've seen, Mongolian armor, and just way too much time spent playing video games and watching horror flicks. And happily, it all actually worked.

These represent my levels of pumpkin carving. Other carvers will certainly have their own interpretation of what that means, but this is what complexity means to me.

The future of pumpkin carving is taking traditional Jack-o'-Lanterns like this, developing new techniques, and building and trying new things very much like we've done here today. And it'll just keep progressing like that into the future.

Thank you, Wired.