Paper Mâché Pumpkin Part 2: The Basic Face

Current state of the pumpkin.

Please note:  I am only blogging about my project.  If you are trying to make one of these pumpkins use all necessary safety precautions such as appropriate tools, eye protection, and working in a well ventilated area when necessary.   This is not a complete list of safety precautions. 

In my last blog post I wrote about how I made the basic paper mâché pumpkin.  It started with some of the methods I have seen on the internet, but I also added my own idea, which seemed to make it have a more authentic pumpkin shape.  Today, I wanted to go into some of the methods I used to make the pumpkin's face.

Before the paper mâché layers.

Cutting out the eyes and mouth.

Anyone who has ever carved a pumpkin knows that there is always going to be one side that is better for a face than any of the others.  My pumpkin was no exception.  On side is a little higher and perhaps a little smoother.  That is the side I am using to carve the face.  But...before you can carve, you have to figure out the face.  It is decision time.  Did I want a happy face, scary face, sad face, etc?  Do you want it to look like a traditional carved pumpkin or do you want to go fancy on the features?  I decided on an angry, scary face.  The trouble is, I am not that great at drawing.  What does an angry face look like?  I know one when I see one, but trying to draw one was going to be a challenge.  In this case, Google Images came to the rescue.  If you input angry face, you will get many different pictures of angry faces.  Most of the faces are people mugging for the camera.  Perhaps actors or others are trying to portray what an angry face looks like.  Most of them seem to be trying to portray an emotion.  This is probably because it is not going to help a situation if you were to take a picture of someone when they are really angry.  Search words for the type of face you want to see:  happy, sad, smiling, and so on will yield lots of faces to help you figure out what you want to put on your pumpkin. 

Cutting open the top.

Anyway, there are a lot of different faces to choose from.  I would add one caveat here.  I pick the eye shape from one person, the mouth from another, and the nose from someone else.  If you just chose everything from one picture you will end up having it look like that person.  That person may not appreciate it if they should ever see a picture of your pumpkin with their face on it.  Furthermore, since this is a Halloween figure, I exaggerate the features as an added effect.  I am not trying to be realistic.  

In order to portray an emotion, you need to pay attention to what the muscles of the face are doing.  For example, what is the mouth doing?  Is it open and yelling, or pinched closed to keep from saying something.  Are the eyes wide open or shifted in one direction?  Are the eyebrows lifted or drawn in toward the nose?  These are the details that will help make the face look like what you want it to look like.  I make a few quick line sketches of some of the details I want to use on my pumpkin.  When I am satisfied with the way things look, I draw it onto the pumpkin.  I am just drawing general placement guidelines.  I may draw and redraw several times.  It does not matter if I use a marker.  Everything will be covered my multiple layers of paint.

At this point, I have not cut open the top of the pumpkin.  You can see in the second picture that I have marked the cutting line with a series of dots.  I feel that the pumpkin is more stable for cutting the face if the top is intact.  Some people prefer to leave the top intact and cut a small opening in the bottom back of the pumpkin for adding lighting such as a battery operated candle and/or electrical cord as needed.  This pumpkin is made of paper, so using a real candle is not the best idea.  However, for this pumpkin, I chose the more traditional top opening.  More on that after cutting out the face.  With twenty-twenty hindsight, I would say it would have been much easier to cut a small hole in the bottom.

When I have a face that I am ready to live with, I begin cutting out the areas that I want to be opened.  I cut open the marked areas using a craft knife.  I used a sharp knife blade and change the blades frequently.  Cutting through six layers of paper mâché is not easy and it is not quick.  It was a slow process.  I started with the eyes because they were smaller.  Then I cut the out the mouth.  I have been tempted to try a dremel too for cutting, but I am concerned that they go too fast and I might end up cutting more than I had intended.  Maybe one day....

 To mark the opening in the top, I put a compass in the center of the stem and it used to mark a circular opening.  The pencil mark was very light and hard to see, so I added the dots in black marker. It was quicker than trying to draw a solid line all the way around the circle.

Getting the top to fit back on tightly was a challenge.  First off, the open edges where I cut the top had to be covered with a couple of layers of paper mâché.  Even just two layers made the top wider than the opening.   I had seen a recommendation on how to make a top fit using paper clay on the internet, but it did not work well for me. The paper clay was moist and the moisture wicked into the paper mâché.  The edge started to get soggy.  I had to pull all of it off. So it was on to Plan B.  My next trial was to cut a wider opening on the pumpkin.  Then I would add a layer of paper
mâché and let it dry.  Then check to see how the top fit.  It might need a little more here and a little more there.  By building up the paper  mâché a little bit on a bit at a time, I finally have a top that fit well.  Now the work is ready to begin.

Believe it or not, these blog posts take a long time to write and edit.  I would love to tell you all about it in one post, but I have already been sitting at the computer for nearly two hours.  My attention is needed elsewhere.  Next blog post I will be blogging about how to create the teeth and lips.  Check back in about a week.

Making a Paper Mâché Pumpkin

The face on the pumpkin

Today I wanted to blog about my latest project; a pumpkin made from paper mâché.   I have been working on this for quite some time, but paper mâché is such a long, slow process, that I wanted to get a few steps completed before I started putting it on the blog.  Otherwise, I am only blogging about adding another layer of paper and flour paste time after time.  Now that I have some of the basic work done, I hope my readers will join me as I continue to work on this project.  I will start from the very beginning and show all the steps for completing the pumpkin over the next few blog posts.  Today's post will be about the project from its concept and the first steps.  

Pumpkin armature

 with tubes.

Earlier in the year, I had blogged that I wanted to start learning about making molds.  Making Halloween decorations is fun, but they take so long that making them one at a time is very time consuming. I thought that if I could learn to make a pumpkin armature and cast the basic form that it would speed up my process.  If nothing else, I would be something new.  This project may be the start of a new way of building some of my Halloween projects.

Fully covered with paper tubes.

One of the interesting things I have seen while surfing the internet for ideas had to do with Halloween dioramas.  Long term readers may recall that I have made a few over the years.  The dioramas that caught my eye were built inside pumpkins.  Many of the makers were using the foam pumpkins called Funkins.  Funkins are really expensive. 

A divider separates halves of the pumpkins.

The other project that really caught my eye were cast cement pumpkins for the garden.  How much fun would it be to make permanent pumpkins that could remain outside.  Long time readers may also recall that I have made a number of hypertufa stained glass gazing balls.  Hypertufa is a form of concrete that is made with additives that make it much lighter than regular concrete.  I had visions of hypertufa pumpkins in my future.  The pumpkins were cast inside of paper mâché pumpkins.  When the concrete had set, the paper mâché form is cut off the hardened concrete.  It seemed like an interesting idea.  I thought I would have to check it out.  However, paper mâché pumpkins from the craft store are not that cheap either.  For the most part, they are hard to find except before Halloween.  I did find some online at a more or less reasonable price, but the shipping charges really caused the cost of the project to rise.

Then came some good news and some bad news.  A craft store in my area was closing (bad news).  The store was consolidating their merchandise at the store from all their stores into my store for deeply discounted sales.  The store had a whole bin of paper mâché pumpkins for forty cents each!  Forty cents each!  Score! (good news)  I wanted to buy ten, but settled for only four.  I do not have a lot of storage area, and the pumpkins are bulky.  Also, I felt like a lot of people might want some of the pumpkins and that I should not be greedy.  I planned to use these four pumpkins for the hypertufa project.  However, Covid-19 interrupted my plan.  I did not have all the materials necessary to mix the hypertufa.  It did not seem worthwhile to go out for the materials during a pandemic.  (bad news) That project has been put on hold until things get better.  For now, that large bag of pumpkins is taking up a lot of space in my studio.

I still wanted to find a less expensive way to make a pumpkin.  I wanted to make more than one though, so I thought I would try making a mold and casting them.  But first, I had to find a pumpkin.  They are scarce around here in winter when I started the project.  Since none were available, I had to make a pumpkin first.  That is how this project got started; with making my own pumpkin.

I looked online and saw many tutorials on how other people were making their pumpkins.  The shapes they made mimicked actual pumpkins with varying degrees of success.  From the standpoint of representational art, they were a success.  However, many of them really did not look like actual pumpkins.  I decided on one way of making a pumpkin and got started.

The method I chose was to fill a plastic bag with paper and tie off the top.  Then,  I tied it with string in four sections to represent the lobes of the pumpkin.  It really did not look much like a pumpkin.  I tried adding another set of four strings to make eight lobes.  It looked more like a squash than a pumpkin and once the paper filling the bags was squashed down it was not nearly as tall as I wanted my pumpkin to be.  Note to self: if you do this again, next time make sure the bag is overstuffed until extra firm.

I was still not satisfied with my pumpkin's height or shape.  I had to try something else.  I decided to head into uncharted territory and find a way to design my own pumpkin.  I looked online at pictures of real pumpkins.  The major difference was that real pumpkins have many more lobes than the pumpkins I was seeing in the tutorials.  I set out to figure out how to add more lobes. 

What I decided to do was to make tubes from newsprint and attach them to the plastic bag pumpkin I had already made.  Each tube is a half sheet of newspaper rolled into a tube.  The tubes were stuffed with crumpled bits of paper to make them a little more rigid.  Both ends of the tube are folded to a point and taped with masking tape.  After that, each tube was taped top and bottom  to the plastic bag pumpkin.  All in all, I added sixteen tubes.  (Whatever number you choose for your pumpkin, make sure that it is an even number.  More on that below.)  Now it looked more like a pumpkin than a squash.  After the tubes were all in place, I covered the whole thing with masking tape.

The next question was how is this going to help me make more than one pumpkin at a time.  I could put layers of paper mâché over this base, but I would tear the whole thing apart trying to get it out.  I also wanted to see what a pumpkin in this shape was actually going to look like.  I decided that I would add a divider so that the pumpkin shape would be made in two parts.  By having an equal number of tubes on each side, it was easy to divide the pumpkin into halves.  The divider was made from corrugated cardboard covered with foil and then with masking tape.  I marked the divider as sides A and B as well as noting which way was the top and which was the bottom.

After all of that, I covered the entire piece with a layer of Press and Seal (Available at grocery stores and some department stores).  Press and seal sticks to your base.  If you cut the Press and Seal into small pieces (small being relative to your project size.) you can adhere it to your base without having many folds or creases that can show up in your project.

Once the entire project was covered with Press and Seal, I gave both sides three layers of paper mâché.  The next step is important.  Make some registration lines on each side of the piece so that you can fit the pumpkin back together with the registration marks on each side matching.  Then, I used a craft knife to gently cut along the edge of the divider.  Once the edges of the pumpkin were separated from the divider, the two halves were easily pulled off the mold.

I used hot glue to glue the edges of the two pumpkin halves together, while making sure my registration marks matched up.  After that, a strip of paper mâché was added over the seam.  After that, three more layers of paper mâché were added to the entire project.

This pretty much catches up to where I am on this project.  I have made a base that I can reuse to make other pumpkins.  I also have plans to make a latex mold of the base that I can use to cast pumpkins in a different way.  I hope that the next step in mold making will allow me to make pumpkins even faster.

Next blog post I will go how I finished the face, eyes, and top.

Life Size Halloween Figure and Goblin Heads

 If you are interested in seeing how the figure was built, you can see it on this blog, by scrolling back to the dates of July 2108 through November 2018.   If you cannot scroll back to it from where you are viewing it, you can  input the following link:   folkartbycaroljones.blogspot.com         The entire build of the figure is there.          

I actually began this project two years ago by making the life-sized figure.  The initial concept was for the doll to be a dancer.  The doll has a wide stance, as if she is just moving into a hip bump dance step.  Her hand was raised because I had originally envisioned her holding either a fan or a scarf.  The more I worked on the project, the less enamored I became with making the doll a dancer, but I also wanted to keep the option open.  The idea evolved more into what would I do if this was a Halloween figure.  (As my husband says, "It's always Halloween here.  He is referring to my constant fascination with making Halloween projects)  I wondered if there might be a way for me to have the doll as a dancer and some type of Halloween figure.  I think that might be accomplished by having changeable costumes.  

From a distance, she almost looks real.

I worked on this doll up until the day of Halloween. The doll was built, but I had no costume for her.  I decided to paint a black leotard on her just so I would be able to get it set out for Halloween.  Then, of course, it rained.  I never even set the doll out.  At that point, I hit burnout from working on the project so extensively that I no longer enjoyed the process.  I decided to set the doll aside until I felt ready to take the project on again.  I spent a year and a half working on other projects.

This year we have all have had to deal with Corona virus.  While we have been in lockdown, I started working on some pâpier mâché Goblin heads.  The heads came out really well.  I decided that maybe this doll should be holding some Goblin heads.  I could picture them hung on a rope.  I started thinking of her as the "Goblin Slayer".  The doll was returned to my project list.

A closer view of the Goblin heads.

At the moment, she still has no costume.  I do not plan on going out shopping for fabric during a pandemic, so the robe will have to wait a bit.  In my mind's eye I am seeing her in a gray (possibly hooded) robe and a few accessories.  I will engineer it with some hook and loop tape so that the robe can be removed. At some point I will also make some type of dance costume.  For the moment, she will have to hang out in her ballet leotard.  I don't think there is any hurry, the general consensus so far is that Halloween trick or treating will not take place this year due to Covid-19.  A local county near us has already announced that the Trunk or Treat event has been canceled.  That will not stop me from decorating for Halloween though.

The PVC armature for this project.

Because I was thinking about this project as having multiple costumes, I decided to make the doll with a normal face.  As most Halloween figures have either ancient witch faces or scary faces, I I thought I could make a mask that I could put on with hook and loop straps that hide under her hair for when I want a different face. I will probably be working on that in the not too distant future.

I haven't blogged about the doll lately, but I thought I would mention that my husband refers to this doll as a "real life Chucky doll.  She has on a number of occasions punched him when he came to close without being wary.  She has also punched one of our friends while his back was turned.  Generally, she does not punch me, but she has banged me on the head a few times.