Carving Pumpkins with a Tiki Twist

Carving pumpkins is one of the great joys of the Halloween season. It’s a chance to get your hands dirty and create some art – which is something that a lot of us don’t do the rest of the year. This year, we’re going a little bit tiki with our pumpkins! First up is a Moai pumpkin, inspired by some of our favorite tiki mugs.

Instead of simply cutting out the outline, we decided to “sculpt” the face by only carving away the skin of the gourd. The outline of the face is deeper than the rest of the carving to give it a lot of definition. We had to do this to emphasize the shape of the ears and the eye of the moai. This gave him a lot of personality for such a stoic guy.

For our second pumpkin, we tried went for a more complicated tiki face. Again, we stuck to the sculpting strategy, but left the skin on most of the carving to ensure that our design looked sharp. The teeth, though, we sculpted in greater detail. Our only regret was that we should have started with a pumpkin that was taller than it was round, but the design still came through beautifully!

Both pumpkins looked amazing when they were lit up. We used LEDs to light them from the inside, rather than candles, since that seems to help improve their shelf life after carving them.