3rd Annual Avatar Pumpkin Carving Competition!

[Alouncara]

Last? Avatar lives on FOREVER! Mwahahaha!

[The Blue Chibi]

Don't start...

Of course not! Next year is when we'll have to show off all those amazing Third Eye Guy pumpkins that we perfected! *thinks wickedly of finding a long oval-shaped gourd for that...*

Hey, are we allowed to carve cabbages?

[Alouncara]

LOL Chibi! I am Gonna Carve Corrots! Mwahaha! They said we could Carve 2 PUMPKINS! Nothing about Carrots, Gourds and all that WONDERFUL Stuff! *Chuckles evily*

[avataranais]

Kaneda, you like Howl's Moving Castle too? I LURVE IT!!

I need to think of something to carve. Any ideas. I want it to be very Fire Nation-y... maybe it can be something about siblings Sokka/Katara and Zuko/Azula.

[Alouncara]

Ozai/Iroh xD Theres a pair for yah! Buff Iroh... Wimpy Ozai who has been sitting on a throne the past hmmm... atleast 2 years!

Howl Moving Castle is one of the best movies done my Hiyo Myazaki! OK some REALLY bad spelling but um anyway xD

[tsuki]

Yay! I was hoping the contest was open again. Last years Chibi Tui and La didn't work out so good.... I should have submitted it anyway... I'm working on the patterns right now!!

EDIT: LAST CONTEST! don't talk about that already.... besides I think as long as one person is on DH we can always have avatar spirit!!! Besides... What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life?

[KiwiMarine]

This year I will actually ENTER!!111
I have a pretty neat idea for my pumpkin.

Ha! Carving cabbages and carrots. x3

[The Blue Chibi]

Whaaat?! Don't tell me everyone's so excited about this lil' ol' upcoming ep that flat-out no-one saw alternatecoppa's beautiful new banner? ;D

[Empy]

I saw it! It's amazing =D I was talking to Ana about it ^_^

[appacatbus]

OOOH A BANNER!


IT MOVES!


CRAZZZEH!

[Musogato]

Thanks Tung for starting the thread, and Kevin for making the banner! And yeah, I am really excited to see the entries for this year's competition too. ^^ I haven't decided what I'm going to carve for my entry though, I need to re-watch the episodes.

As for this being the last contest.... NO WAY! The love for carving Avatar characters into the sides of pumpkins and rutabagas and what-have-you will live on far longer than the end of season three, and as such so will the contest. As long as I'm able to run the contest and people are willing to enter, the competition will live on.

[notreal]

appacatbus said:

OOOH A BANNER!


IT MOVES!


CRAZZZEH!

Almost as amazingly awesome as your invisible graphics. =D

[liz6363]

I'm carving the face that Teo drew in the sky of Aang, but it's too simple to win. I'll probably enter it though.

[alternatecoppa]

Yes! Do it! Do it! It's fun!

For my entry this year, I didn't want to just replicate the same style I did last year with the multi-level Blue Spirit... I wanted to try something totally different. In fact, it was something I had never attempted before.

As such I don't think it was as successful as what I had envisioned in my mind, but now I think I have the experience that I could do something like it again in the future with a little more success.

Basically I didn't just want to make a face on a single pumpkin... I wanted to form several pumpkins into a 3-D sculpture of a character! I chose Appa since he's already round & lumpy and therefore practically a series of pumpkins to start with. XD

I started off with 2 standard pumpkins, 2 cherry pumpkins, and 6 smaller pumpkin gourds for the feet.



I planned to use the standard pumpkins for the body and the two cherry pumpkins for the head and tail. The tail was make by cutting one in half and only using the one half. The other was worn on my head so I could remove it and imitate the scene from "Hannibal" for all the kids who were trick-or-treating... Okay maybe not.



I orginally planned to have the body made up of two shapes but found the porportions were off and didn't look qute as good. So I took it away from my Appa plans and instead gave it a standard Halloween face. After all, Appa needed some kind of company on my porch:



I didn't have as much free time as I've had in years past for carving so I did the rest of the face and body parts free hand instead of printing out a template this year. So, yes, I know that's why it looks a little rough.

I chopped "Legs" out of the side of the main body and attached them to toothpicks to sit just above the small gourd feet. And of course I saved a couple of stems for the horns!

After that, it was simply a matter of getting a big enough and bright enough set of candles to to set the body parts over:






I eventually had to settle on using a battery powered lantern under the main body. The tail you'll notice isn't glowing because no matter what I put under it for light, the darn thing kept smoking & burning! So I decided no tail glow was better than a burnt-down house. XD

Like I said, this was a new experiment for me and I'm not totally happy with it but I have to say, I was blown away by how many kids who saw it knew what it was!

"That's Appa!" They'd scream or, "Ava-Tar!" Or the funniest one of all was a little girl who gave a jaded comment of, "Oh, yeah. My Dad watches that show." XD

Despite it's failings, it was still fun to make and it was also great to get to know that more people than just us nutty internet dweebs are watching the show!

[West]

WOW.....