Nightmare Before Christmas Pumpkin

Long time, no blog!  Hope everyone is having fun gearing up for Halloween this week.  Though Halloween isn't my all-time favorite of all the holidays, there are still some fun traditions that I like to keep up as an adult.  One of those is pumpkin carving!  Below is my version of recreating Jack from the Nightmare Before Christmas, one of my favorite movies.

All you need is a nice more round pumpkin, some white paint, carving knife, electric tea lights and you're all set.

First you have to do the dirty work of scraping out the pumpkin.  After cutting the top off, I still use the same method that my mother used when we used to carve pumpkins as kids. If you have one, it works wonders but this old school plastic spoon that she gave me, still does the trick.  It's great for scraping along the sides and with the long hand, you don't have to get too messy!  

Once the pumpkin is hollowed out, I draw my design on with a pen, then color in with marker where I need to cut out.  Remember that even though small intricate cuts are nice to look at, try to be realistic depending on what tools you have to work with! There are many nice stencils available online if you just want to search for them on Google.

Once the design is carved, you can paint the pumpkin with white paint.  I used a mixture of white interior paint with white grout to make some chalk paint but you can use whatever you have handy.

Let your pumpkin dry and then you're ready to put him outside!

Also check out this awesome Joker pumpkin design my husband chose.  He just printed out the template, cut out the shaded areas with an X-acto knife, traced the edges and carved it out!

                                     Happy Halloween!