Vinyl Scratch Pumpkin

My Vinyl Scratch pumpkin for Halloween this year, 2012!

I had seen the amazing Derp-O-Lantern posted on EQD and My Little Brony. Here it is if you haven't seen it yet:

[link]

I'm to understand some artists do this sort of work with a Dremel tool (though that particular one somehow did it with an X-acto knife and some of what look like wood-carving tools and I assume a lot of unicorn magic)... but I have a Dremel that my boyfriend won from work that I've never used before, and I was so sorely disappointed by my 2009 foray into pumpkin carving with a butcher knife (useless!) that I really wanted to do something spectacular this year.

Well, this didn't come out *spectacular* but it's better than I expected of myself!

For those of you not "in the know", this effect is achieved by carving the pumpkin at different depths to represent different colors. The deeper you carve, the thinner the pumpkin hull, and the brighter the light shines through... so you carve deeper for light colors, less deep for medium/dark, and don't carve at all for black. Additionally, to project something out the back of your pumpkin on a wall behind it, all you need to do is carve a mirror image into the back of the pumpkin!

I had some issues with consistency of depth that took much time to sort out and overall I believe this pumpkin probably took about 4-5 straight hours of covering myself and everything around me in a fine mist of pumpkin flesh bits. I'm sad to say the "Wub Wub Wub" on the back is just as hard to read IRL as in the picture; I mistakenly forgot to scrape the inside of the pumpkin thinner/less stringy before carving the letters in, and they were too fragile for me to scrape at after carving. I'm learning as I go, here.

I'll be submitting this to EQD's pumpkin carving event, of course!

I actually used the vector from Makintosh91, which you can find here:
[link]
... although I had to make some adjustments/take some liberties because I had to free-hand her on the pumpkin with a marker, so it's not nearly exact

This pumpkin carving is © Forlorn Mists/K. Hanning
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Vinyl Scratch/DJ-Pon3 belong to Hasbro.