Anime up your Halloween!

[mugoi_usagi]

Hey there! So Halloween is a'coming and I'm gearing up for some serious pumpkin carving! (going to a carving party on Sunday!)

Anyway, so I had a fun pumpkin last year with a Macross Frontier theme. This year I was trying to think of how to do another super cool anime pumpkin and decided to use Kobato as my inspiration. I've made an Ioryogi pattern to use and thought you guys might like the idea so you can create your own anime themed pumpkins!
 

[mugoi_usagi]

I decided to do Ioryogi because he's got a lot of contrast so it would be easy to select spots to cut out so that you could still see what he was.

So I started by finding a picture of Ioryogi that I liked. (Thanks Google Images!)

Here's the picture I found!

Now there's a nice scary Ioryogi!

The next step was to cut him out and blow him up big enough to put on a pumpkin. I blew him up to 500%.

Here's how it came out:


Then I opened my handy dandy Photoshop CS and pulled out my tablet. (Don't worry, you can totally do this with MS Paint and a mouse!)

I chose the biggest dark parts like the arms and legs and traced around them. (this is where layers are handy in Photoshop)

Next I decided what other details I wanted that I could do easily and picked his mouth. I traced around the teeth so that I could cut out the inside of the mouth.

Because I wanted him to come across as super angry, like in the original picture, I'll be cutting a bit of the outline of his nose and eyes.

Remember that you can't really have floating pumpkin chunks so all the white parts have to be connected! We're only cutting out the black parts. This is why I have some minor outlining but left large gaps between each of the larger cutouts.

If you have photoshop, it's useful to turn on and off the original picture so you can get a good sense of how it's looking.

Then you just fill in all the outlines with black, get rid of the original picture, and print!

Here's how mine looks now that it's finished:


If it's not big enough for your pumpkin, just blow up the pattern some more!


Try to choose simple pictures without too much detail and lots of large shapes. This may seem like it can be time consuming, but I did it in about 30 minutes! I'll have to post pictures of how it comes out!  

[magicalgirlme]

We normally can't because of being in a dorm, but technically we can do it this year! heart

Best of luck with the carving, shall we do a contest?

 

[Abiding Angel]

@ Mugoi: Looks super cute! Good work, and can't wait to see the final result. biggrin

@Yama: why, yes, I think a contest sounds in order. biggrin

 

[mugoi_usagi]

Finally found my camera and got a pic of the final result! Unfortunately it has been warm and rainy these past few days so Ioryogi is getting super fuzzy on the inside and it's blocking some of the detail work. Here's a shot where you can see things pretty well:

 

[mugoi_usagi]

Sad news:
Ioryogi was condemned to the compost heap yesterday night. He had begun to collapse into an unsightly heap of mold and rot, leaving a juicy puddle on the porch.

Fortunately, I also carved 6 more pumpkins last night to replace him.  

[Abiding Angel]

Dawww, but at least you have 6 more. I wasn't able to buy a pumpkin in time for this. ;_; But I send a pumpkin in spirit. It would have looked like Shinigami-sama:


Oh well, Happy Halloween any way!