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PennsylvaniaHere's our annual Halloween pumpkin and group picture for this year:
Happy Halloween!
P.S. - Post your Halloween pictures here too! 
Happy Halloween to all of you, too! It looks like the bears did some excellent pumpkin carving. 
Becky
PennsylvaniaThanks! :)
Every year one of the bears gets his picture carved into a pumpkin. This year it was Oliver's turn. He's the Bear sitting to the right of the pumpkin on the right. He is a difficult Bear to carve because all the detail in his fur is what makes his picture stand out. We used a lemon zester and a utility knife to cut the fur detail. It was tough but it turned out well. Oliver is pleased with his pumpkin. 
The other pumpkin is a Coca Cola polar bear. It was probably the most ambitious carving we have done. We didn't think it would turn out but, when you turn the lights off and light the candle, it looks really good.
We're glad you like our pumpkins! :)
Does anybody else have any pumpkin pictures to post? We bet all you Bear artists must have some cool pumpkins too! 
Boechout, AntwerpWow, that is some excellent carving work! And what a lovely Halloween photo of all the bears (or at least a small part of them 
).
Although Halloween isn't really catching on here in Belgium (although shopkeepers are trying to convince us otherwise 
), I did set up a small Halloween photo shoot for a contest on a French teddy bear forum. Here is the result (some of you will have seen it already on my FB page).
Hugs, :hug:
Peter & the bears
The Littlest ThistleFun pics, you obviously have very talented bears to do that carving Randy
PennsylvaniaI always like to see your photos, Peter. They are always creative and the lighting always shows off the Bears' fur.
I took Oliver's photo with my digicam. There's no sense in developing film then scanning it if you're not going to use the actual photo. Oliver downloaded his picture and imported it into Adobe Illustrator. Then he used the "Live Trace" feature to vectorize it into outlines. He used "Live Paint" to color it at three levels. Brights, mids and darks. The result gets scaled for size and printed out on paper.
I hollowed out the pumpkin. The Bears don't like to get pumpkin innards in their fur! 
Take a sharp-edged spoon and scrape the pumpkin shell until it's about an inch thick. If you have a thick-walled pumpkin and you don't do this, it's hard to carve. Once it's hollowed out, wash it with warm water then wipe it down, inside and out with a paper towel soaked with rubbing alcohol. Afterward, use more towels to dry the pumpkin, inside and out, very well. If you don't wash and dry your pumpkin the dirt and bacteria will cause it to rot very quickly. Done properly, your pumpkin can last a week or more, provided you keep it cool.
Next, we affixed the paper pattern to the pumpkin with cellophane tape. Sometimes you have to cut slots in the corners of the pattern to get it to bend around the curve of the pumpkin. Use a small nail or the point of an old ballpoint pen and poke little holes in the pattern, into the pumpkin. Basically, you're making a "connect the dots" game out of your pattern. When you're done, take a "Sharpie" marker and trace your lines so you know where to cut.
Remember how I said you make your pattern with brights mids and darks? In the areas that are bright, color them in with the marker. You don't have to be perfect. This is only to remind you what parts of the pumpkin to cut. In the areas that are middle, draw hash marks. Leave the dark areas alone.
This is the part where the Bears leave me to do the most of the work. We don't let them play with sharp instruments.
Use a sharp utility knife to cut half way through the pumpkin shell, outlining the middle. Next, carefully cut away the pumpkin skin, leaving the light colored flesh underneath intact. What's going to happen is that you'll make these parts translucent. The light from the candle with show through. The parts where you don't cut away anything will be dark. You have just created your mids and your darks. Finally, cut out the colored in parts where you want the brights to be.
Instead of using a knife to cut out the pumpkin, we use a thin coping saw blade. Cut it off short so that it's about 2 or 3 inches long. Wrap one end up in duct tape to make a handle. They make kits that have ready-made pumpkin cutters but we just use things that we already have around the house. Why buy something that you already have?
When you're done, you'll have pumpkins that look like this:
When you light the candle and turn off the lights, they look like this:
It's not that hard once you get the idea how to do it. It just takes a bit of work to do it. I figure most of you guys are used to doing these kinds of things for the sake of art so I feel all right about telling you all the steps in detail.
When I was a kid, my father taught me how to carve pumpkins like this but he was a good artist. He was a cartoonist before I was born. He used to draw faces on pumpkins freehand. I can sketch a little bit but I never got good enough to do that.
I saw pumpkin patterns in the store one Halloween, several years ago and I figured out how they make them. Now, me and the Bears create them on the computer.
We always have the best pumpkins in the neighborhood. Me and the Bears feel proud when people comment on them.
Thanks for letting me tell you how to do it. Maybe some of you guys can do it next year. Me and the Bears would really like to see what you guys can come up with. 
Past Time BearsVery cool, Randy!
PennsylvaniaThanks! :)
Carving pumpkins has always been my favorite part of Halloween.
Passing out candy for Trick or Treat is a lot of fun, too. We live on a corner so we're kind of a lookout point for neighborhood watch. We only ever had one, very minor problem in almost ten years.
We didn't have quite as many Trick or Treaters this years because the weather was crummy. :(
We did, however, get two kids in Bear costumes! :cool:
One was a Care Bear. The other was Fozzy Bear from the Muppet Show.
Of course, kids in Bear costumes always get extra treats from us! 
