Bib Fortuna Jack O’Lantern by Me

Two years ago, I tried carving a Jabba Jack O’Lantern using a rotary tool, and it was harder than I thought it would be. It came out okay and looked pretty when cool lit up, but it didn’t really give me the effect that I had hoped for. This year, I’m trying a totally different technique — 3D pumpkin carving. Rather than cutting holes in the pumpkin, you actually make use of the rind to do a 3D sculpture. I’ve seen some mind-blowing pumpkins done this way, and in fact many of them had me questioning whether this kind of sculpting was even possible without resorting to some kind of trickery.

I decided to purchase Ray Villafane’s 3D pumpkin carving tutorial to see just how these are made, with the ultimate goal of trying another Jabba. This is really just a practice pumpkin to help me get the feel for it. It’s my second one, and it’s already immeasurably better than my first attempt. You may use a knife toward the end, but for the most part you use tools called ribbon loop tools, which are used in sculpting clay. You use them to sort of scrape away parts of the rind until you get it looking how you want.

Now, I’m no artist so I could certainly use some more practice both in terms of working with pumpkins and in terms of sculpting human anatomy, but I think it came out pretty well. I might have liked to incorporate the lekku (head tentacles) to make it more obvious that it was Bib, but I wasn’t sure how to go about that, and in any case this was really just a way to get my feet wet, so to speak. Stay tuned for more!