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.