Pumpkin Portrait
Posted by Brian.
Here’s the pumpkin I carved for the Keene Pumpkin Festival.
I started with a black and white photo of me and Beth, which I loaded into the GIMP.
First I increased the contrast on the image enough to remove some information and simplify the shapes. Then I erased some background and added an ellipse mask. Next I posterized to reduce the shades of gray to 3 (white, grey, and black). From there I used bucket fill to assign the grey fields to either white or black on a case by case basis. I found that this yielded a more recognizable image than just posterizing to 2 colors from the start.
I inverted the image to get a negative (mostly to save ink), and printed the image, which I then stapled to the pumpkin. I transferred the picture by poking through along all the lines with a sharp stylus. Then I removed the skin from the light parts with a sharp pointy knife.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:58 am Using
Amazing, mi amigo, simply amazing…
Great work, B!
October 29th, 2007 at 3:52 pm Using
Is “sharp pointy knife” a technical term?
One year I got really bored and used my wood-carving tools on a jack-o-lantern. Awesome pumpkin, but really gross/hard to clean, don’t recommend it.
but yeah, nice work.
October 29th, 2007 at 4:50 pm Using
I tried doing this sort of thing a couple of years ago and it was a complete disaster. It’s really kind of amazing how well your pumpkin turned out, you and Beth are instantly recognizable.
That’s a cool tricky posterizing to three levels and then using your brain. I was trying to do some posterization this weekend and couldn’t get a good result. I’ll have to try your method next time.