#34: The Pumpkin Head Collector
Hello friends and happy 1st day of October!! It’s my birth-month and favorite time of the year 🧡🍂
Hurricane Ian was insaneee for a lot of people. Milton and I are super fortunate and grateful that the worst thing we lost was a few fence posts 🙏🏼
Above is the final photo of the pumpkin collector!
Bwahahaha ✂️🎃🎃🎃
Let’s dive deep into how I made this happen!
The Sketch
I knew I wanted to do a pumpkin head shoot but I really wanted it to be different than what you typically see. So I came up with this idea and sketched it out on my iPad. This really gave me a visual of how I wanted it to look.
Purchased pumpkins from Trader Joes the following week. It was only $5 each! We bought 6.
Carving time! 🎃✨
We used paint markers to draw on our pumpkins. This was super helpful because you could erase the paint afterwards with just soap and water! 🧼 It was my first time carving ever so this was my favorite part of the project.
And then the moment of truth… 👎🏼🥴👎🏼 The pumpkins didn’t fit our heads!! 😂 Thankfully one kind of did fit but only if you tilted it forward. Otherwise, you could see the bottom of your chin. Next time we’ll have to be even bigger pumpkins.
I also painted these giant scissors I had all black ✂️ These things are razor sharp btw!
Shoot & Editing Tips
This is the main image I used to start off with the editing process ☝🏼 You can see the top edges are missing parts of the sky. That’s because I distorted the image a little bit, but nothing to worry because that can be fixed with Photoshop magic! 🪄 I used the spot healing brush to fix this.
We also used a camera remote to take our picture. You can see Milton holding it in his right hand!
Since it didn’t fit on his head, I had Milton hold the pumpkin head in front of him while he stood in the same spot earlier. That way we get the most accurate lighting.
Then in post, I did the following edits:
- shadows on his chin using burn tool
- enlarged the pumpkin guts on the scissors using lasso tool
- placed in the pumpkin head using lasso tool
- and added shadows and highlights where the eyes and mouth are using burn burn and dodge tools
I took separate images of the pumpkins at different angles and also stacked. I will use these images in post to copy/paste the pumpkins into my main image.
And finally I removed my head using 2 tools: spot healing brush and clone stamp tool. Then I erased any cracks or crevices on the pavement using the spot healing brush. I also used that to remove the camera remote from Milton’s hand too!
Tadahhh - here’s the before (raw, unedited) and the after!!
This was a suuuper fun project where I really tested my Photoshopping skills. What do you think?!
Thank you all for reading and looking. I hope you enjoyed this one. Happy fall and stay safe! Until next Friday! 🌞✨
Comin’ up next on the weekly phlogs…
