Everyone who works here at Sand In Your Eye has their own strengths but one place we all excel is pumpkin carving!! It’s fair to day that over the years, between the team we have carved 100s of Octobers most popular round orange vegetable.
This October was no different to others, we were up to our elbows in pumpkin guts, bringing many quirky pumpkin personality to life one at a time. Whilst 3D pumpkin carving is a real joy, it’s not the only technique we use to carve a pumpkin. One other technique we practice is stencil pumpkin carving, a real labor of love. An often very detailed design is applied to a pumpkin skin and then meticulously cut and removed at varying depths below the skin, to unveil the paler flesh of the pumpkin.
Stencil pumpkin carving lends itself particularly well to company logos and often more vector type images often with lots of detail and intricacy. The precise nature of these types of designs can be enhanced further by carving deeper in well planned areas, meaning when lit from the inside the pumpkin design will glow with tonal depths.
Check out these stencil carved pumpkins for Sunny Delight.
Towards the end of the month we received a call from beauty brand Elemis who were hoping to create a pumpkin image for their social media accounts advertising their Elemis Pro-Collagen Cleansing Balm .
After some careful consideration of the Elemis packaging, a design suitable for carving but still including ALL the words from the cosmetic, was created and signed off.
Rewind a few weeks to when Jamie, Mark and Amy visited the pumpkin farm and the team had the foresight to pick up more pumpkins than we needed to fill the current pumpkin carving jobs that were already booked in. Heading to the giant fridge here in the studio the perfect pumpkin for the design was chosen, prepared and set up ready to have its new high end facelift!!
The Elemis design included over 50 letters, ranging from approximately 3cm tall to as small as 5mm tall. Very tricky cutting indeed. It took almost a full day to trace the outline of each letter with a scalpel carefully into the thick skin of the pumpkin before the equally tricky job of removing the sections of skin to reveal the image could begin.
Once the Stencil carving was complete, Claire and Jocasta gutted the pumpkin and prepared the internal pumpkin flesh ready for it to be lit from within and the final images shot. One Sand In Your Eye photograph session later, we edited to photos and sent the final assets directly to the client at Elemis ready for them to use as part of their October marketing campaign. Which was a hit!
Check out some of the other pumpkin carving projects we’ve completed over the years below.
