Pumpkin Art - Pumpkin carving

I saw a pumpkin carved this way about 10 years ago and have been carving our pumpkin this way ever since. I can't take credit for the scary one which my daughter did with her uncle on a visit to the southwest...inspired by a NewYorker cover.

The pumpkins are carved with woodcarving tools to a depth of about 1/4" after a pattern is drawn. You have to have a sense of negative and positive spaces but usually the lines are just thickened to about 1/8 to 1/4" and all the rest are dug out unless you want a large dark area. Then you scrape out the insides to thin out the drawing so the candle can illuminate the art. You have to scrape it until it's fairly thin. A large soup spoon works very well. Try a simple design first. The results are fairly breathtaking though time consuming...usually take me about 2 hours or more to do one.

Just some observations and comments on posting photos. I decided to go back to posting photos with Blogger instead of PhotoBucket. I can't seem to control the size of the photos with PB even when re-sizing them on the PB site. I don't have control of placement with Blogger but at least I can specify size small,med or large and not have copy superimposed on photos.

I also noticed that the blog displays differently using browsers other than Firefox. Explorer places all the links on the bottom of the blog while FF puts it on the side. Opera is similar to FF.