Putting a Bright Face on Things

We've developed a bit of a reputation around here for our annual pumpkin carving. Some of it may even be deserved!

Fiona's was the most straightforward pumpkin of the evening. The cat even posed for me as I inked the design, and Deborah and Fiona cut it out.

Aiden wanted a dragon. I just about gave myself carpal tunnel trying to cut that thing out. It was cool, though. I'm especially proud of the fire; this year, I tried doing some of the carving outside with the candle already lit, and it makes a HUGE difference to be able to see how the lighting turns out as you're working on it. I'll have to do more of that.

Every year, I try something harder than I can handle. It's practically a tradition in itself. This year, I went for a self-portrait...

I might have done better if I had, say, printed the picture out ahead of time, or marked it up in Photoshop to see where best to keep things connected, and where to work on the shading... but I winged it. I had to keep on turning on the camera every few minutes (a challenge with goopy fingers!) and then the batteries died, and then I broke the mouth off... oh, well. There's always next year. I'll let you decide if there's any resemblance or not.

Paul explored recursion with his pumpkin. This is something I've come to expect from programmers. Several years ago, we decorated stockings for Christmas, and Paul's design was a QBASIC program that, when run, would blink "Merry Christmas" in the middle of the screen in red and green.

Far and away the best this year was Deborah's. She went outside and got some maple leaves from our trees, traced them onto her pumpkin, and cut them out.