Neocolours

Heeeeey happy October everyone! I've been on a bit of an October high all day. I want to carve all the things, but I am busy with classes and crap. Arg.

So I looked back and realized I never posted any of the Halloween pumpkins from last year! What the heck. You get them now. Note: Sorry for all the poopy watermarks, but I'm sick of these things getting loose on the internet without ever linking back to the source. But the larger versions on DA are poopy watermark free: http://joh-wee.deviantart.com/

The first two were done for the haunted house put on by the anime club for my school. They ended up getting stolen after the first night though, along with my two battery lights. Still kinda super annoyed about that. Anime club has to buy their own lights next year :P

Both stencils are great ones from Zombie Pumpkins.

My theme for my own Halloween carving marathon was Harry Potter, since I had gone to Leakycon the previous summer and was all Harry Potter crazy at the time. Started with Harry, Voldemort, and Dumbledore:

Harry and Dumbledore were from Zombie Pumpkins again, Voldemort from Jammin Pumpkins.

Then I went nuts on a huge ass pumpkin that weighed like 50 lbs and took a billion hours to carve. But it was totally worth it, I consider this one of my masterpieces:

My own pattern, and also my 100th pumpkin carved in the last 10 years.

And then I finished up some more characters with Snape and Sirius:

Snape from Jammin Pumpkins, Sirius from Zombie Pumpkins.

That was it for last year. I carved a couple watermelons over the summer too:

One of my favorite random pokemon.


Pinkie Pie breaking the fourth wall!


Psyduck.


And a kinda redux version of a really old watermelon I carved my first year. Only this time I carved Pikachu-coloured Pichu and Spiky-eared Pichu, as opposed to the Pichu Brothers. A good excuse to carve more adorable Pichu.

I had two more watermelon carves planned but I ran out of time. Before I knew it, the pumpkins had emerged!


My traditional late International Talk Like a Pirate Day carve. Jack Sparrow, since I'm running out of good pirate patterns to carve. The Zombie Pumpkins version of the pattern.


And finally we catch up to yesterday, where I carved the Charizard that has been blowing up my DA page all day. It actually made the front page, which has always been a milestone goal of mine. It's been up a little less than 24 hours and it's already my 5th most popular pumpkin. So yeah, it's had me on a bit of a natural high all day :D

So yup, those be the pumpkins so far! I've got more pokemon planned for next weekend, plus a bunch of other random nerdy things I want to carve, and two ideas for Halloween themes this year. I might actually do both since they're relatively small and Halloween is on a freaking Wednesday this year, so I can carve them on the sandwiching weekends.

Other fun things I have planned is streaming video of me carving on Livestream. I had a show yesterday for Charizard, but only three people showed up so it was kind of lonely. But it was also filled with shenanigans and profanity when I screwed up and broke things! I can post a link here next time I stream so you guys can watch if you want!

Also feel free to bother me if I forget to post Halloween pictures like last year xD

Oh my goodness, that's incredible!~

Wow, has it been so long?

I love the hogwarts pumpkin. It's so great to see all that detail carved perfectly! The pichus and the charizard are also damn sweet.

Your pumpkins are always so amazing! Glad it's October again.

And I like hanging around in streams. I'd love to watch you carve one of these things. If I'm awake when you post a link, I'll hop on over.

As always, AMAZING, thanks for sharing your brilliant carvings with us!

Amazing as always Joey, thank you for posting!

These are great! The amount of detail in the Hogwarts shield is particularly awe-inspiring.

These are absolutely amazing. I especially love Dumbledore.

Every time I see or hear someone reference Malcolm Gladwell's theory of "10,000 hours of practice to become a master" I think of you and your pumpkins. Surely you must be getting pretty close to that mark. You do a phenomenal job every year.

The Hogwarts crest is amazing, of course, but so are all the others. I think pumpkin carving is one of those things that a person can't fully appreciate until they've tried to do it themselves. And I don't just mean the typical triangle-eyes pattern, but actually tried to carve a complex image. It's so hard! It really is an art, and you've got a talent for it. Your Zombie Pumpkins are among the best I've seen done, but I'm really taken with the patterns you designed yourself. Again, I think it's an under-appreciated skill, to be able to figure out all the negative space stuff. So many people forget that things can't just float around in there, everything has to be anchored to something.

It's awful that someone stole your pumpkins, but I hate to say I can totally see why. Who wouldn't want to pass one of these off as their own?

Geez Joey, your pumpkins this year are just -wild-, seriously! They look fantastic! The pichu brothers one is my favorite ;)

Thanks everyone! I will reply with more later, but for now I'm running a livestream! http://www.livestream.com/PumpkinJoey?t=842184 Come watch me carve instead of playing the new pokemon games xD

Muwahahaha, double post time. Thanks everyone who came to yesterday's stream, it's far more entertaining to carve while people are in the chat! My twitter account is probably the best thing to follow to find out about planned streams and such.

I'm kinda spacy from carving too much yesterday, so I just wanna say thank you for all the comments guys! I love posting them here since you guys are so awesome!

So yeah, I meant to do two pumpkins Saturday, plus one or two easier ones on Sunday. That didn't get around to happening, there was bad juju involved. Instead I spent 10 hours carving two monsters yesterday, and today I'm really sleepy.

But I ended up finishing these guys in honor of the Black 2 and White 2 release:


About 10 hours total. I had a lot of fun playing with different carving techniques to create contrast between the two. But shading an entire pumpkin like Reshiram is a pain in the butt and all those finicky lines on Zekrom are super tedious. I'm so glad it turned out as well as it did or I would have flipped some tables.

Now I'm gonna go play White 2 for awhile :D

That's a really wonderful pair! The zekrom one makes me really want to get a good zekrom in game. Pity, since I picked up white 2.

I forgot to post here when I started, but I'm still streaming a pumpkin request by a friend: http://www.livestream.com/PumpkinJoey?t=842184

Done for the night!

These are, as usual, totally :bleep:ing awesome. The Hogwarts one is my favorite!

So much work to put into something that will eventually decompose. There's probably a metaphor for the transient nature of life in there somewhere.