Jack-O-Lanterns 2024

Here are the Jack-O-Lanterns I created for the Minnesota Zoo in my fourth year on the show. The theme for the 2024 show was “Wanderlust”, and spanned many genres. The first several pumpkins I carved I unfortunately didn’t get to see lit, as they were early in the show and the heat made them rot before I got a chance to visit the trail.

Many of the artists at the studio get creative with “hidden pumpkins” (jack-o-lanterns where you wouldn’t expect to see them). I added them to three of my pumpkins this year. I’ll definitely be looking to do more of that for future shows!

It is hard to pick a favorite from this show — It’s tied between Totoro, Zelda, and Metroid. I’m planning to take time off right before the 2025 show opens — that way I can maximize the number of pumpkins drawn in September, and have time to carve them before the show opens.

If you want to learn more about the show and the process of creating these Jack-O-Lanterns, see my post All About Pumpkin Carving!

Gnome Alchemist Coloring Page

Here is my Gnome Alchemist piece! This was my second time submitting an entry for the Minnesota Renaissance Festival coloring book contest, and I made it into the book again and got two free tickets to the festival as a prize (as well as a copy of the coloring book).

I wanted to design a composition that used the whole page with a border and a bit of an art nouveau inspiration.

Like my Dragon Summoner piece, I’m offering this coloring page as a free/pay what you want download. If you're interested you can download it here! I’d love to see the finished product. Have fun!

All About Pumpkin Carving!

In the fall of 2021 I had the opportunity to carve pumpkins for the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular at the Minnesota Zoo. The show is created by Passion for Pumpkins, a Massachusetts based company that runs Jack-O-Lantern shows at a few locations across the United States. It runs for the entire month of October, generally thru the weekend after Halloween, but designing the first rounds of pumpkins for the trail starts in early September — there’s a lot to do!

The on-site studio hosts multiple artists that come and go as their availability allows throughout September and October. Most of September is spent drawing designs on the first couple rounds of pumpkins. A week or so before the show opens, the first round of pumpkins is carved. Right before they hit the trail, the pumpkins are gutted (thankfully the artists don’t have to do that part!).

Due to the transient nature of Jack-O-Lanterns, it’s common for 4-5 rounds of pumpkins to be cycled through the trail throughout the course of the show. Cool, dry weather is great for pumpkins — warm, wet weather? Not so much. Pumpkins will darken with rot and eventually collapse. This keeps the studio busy till close to the end of the show.

Let’s talk a bit more about the actual designing and carving process.

There are two main stages: Draw & Carve

Draw

During the Draw stage, an image is selected and printed off for reference. Artists have the option of using the darkroom and projectors in the studio to cast the image onto the pumpkin and trace a portion of the image onto the pumpkin, or to work freehand. Projecting is very useful when proportions are important, such as for portraits of celebrities. The image will warp around the round ‘canvas’ of the pumpkin at the edges, making it challenging to avoid skewing proportions. I tend to spend as little time in the darkroom as possible and use it mostly for ‘landmarks’ and general layout. More often I will freehand my pumpkins. The Draw stage is not usually the prettiest to look at — the goal is to add enough information to the pumpkin so that you know exactly where you need to carve.

The pumpkins need to be washed with water and paper towels, and the rest of the drawing supplies rely heavily on alcohol based ink products.

  • Alcohol Ink - Painted directly onto pumpkins to create strong contrast

  • Isopropyl Alcohol - Used to dilute alcohol ink for lighter gray tones, and to erase mistakes

  • Plastic Cups - Used as ink wells

  • Cotton Swabs - Used with isopropyl alcohol to erase smaller detail areas

  • Alcohol Markers - Grays are good for initial sketches and layout, black works well for detail work

  • Synthetic Brushes, Various - Great for covering large areas and creating organic strokes and textures

Drawing Supplies

Carving Supplies

Carve

This is when the design really starts to pop! Depending on the stage of the show, carving can take place as long as weeks later than the drawing stage, or as soon as the same day. A variety of carving tools are used for scraping and sculpting the surface. You don’t want to carve too deep into the pumpkin, as this leaves the Jack-O-Lantern more susceptible to rotting quickly. The pumpkins are lit by powerful bulbs, which shine through the pumpkin’s outer rind, so there are really three levels of value you’re working between:

  • Light - The carved out areas of the design

  • Medium - The uncarved, uninked areas of the design

  • Dark - The inked areas of the design

In addition to carving tools, we also use waterproof sandpaper at various grit levels to create smooth gradients between the different brightness levels. I like to cut a small piece and tape it to a carpenter’s pencil to make it easier to complete the sanded areas. I love the warm glowing effect sanding creates!

Once the carve is completed, the pumpkin waits to be gutted on the day it is put out on the trail. That’s when the rot-clock really starts ticking. Depending on the weather, a pumpkin might last only a few days, up to a few weeks! It’s a fickle medium to work with, but it’s a whole lot of fun being out in the fresh air, working on a funky, curved canvas, and sharing my art with everyone who attends the show.

Below are links to the Jack-O-Lanterns I have carved throughout the years I have worked on the show:

Detective Murray Children's Book

One of my Dungeons and Dragons pals is involved in book publishing at Rivershore Books. I had created character art of our adventuring party, and after seeing my work she asked if I would be interested in referrals from authors seeking illustrators.

Having a full time job and a family doesn’t leave me with a lot of bandwidth to take on large freelance projects, but I said yes, figuring if a project wasn’t a good fit I could always decline. The very first client she introduced me to ended up being about the easiest client I have ever had the pleasure to work with — she was looking for an illustrator for her children’s book about a basset hound that uses his sense of smell to solve a mystery. After some back and forth, I took the gig.

To determine the general style and artistic medium for the book, I asked the client for examples of existing children’s books that had a similar style to what she envisioned, and did two test images (based on my son and my dog) to make sure we were on the same page. Ultimately I ended up using a combination of digital and traditional media, but maintained the watercolor and ink outline look that the client wanted.

After that it was time for visual development. This primarily consisted of figuring out how basset hounds work, how to handle making twins look like twins but also distinct, supporting character designs, and location paintings based on reference from the client — the setting was based on her hometown. There was a lot of back and forth with the client during this part of the process.

Once the designs were agreed upon, I storyboarded the book (the stick-figure version) to figure out which images would be needed, what was going to be a full page illustration vs a spot illustration, and so on. After that, I created the rough illustrations and a color script to finalize the compositions and color palette.

Up to this point, the work had all been done digitally on my iPad. Now it was time to get the watercolors out and start painting the final images! I ended up printing the approved digital roughs and lightly tracing them onto watercolor paper, then working through the final paintings mostly by color — for example, I mixed the blue for the sky and painted all the pages with sky, then mixed the brown for the basset hound and painted all the pages with the basset hound, etc.

When it came time for inking, I scanned the watercolor paintings and did the ink and clean up digitally. Below is the final result from some of the pages — if you want to see all of them you’ll have to buy the book!

Throughout the two year process the client was easy to communicate with, flexible on the timeline, and understanding when life happened and progress slowed down. I felt super blessed to have such a great client — 10/10, would work for again!

Some future goals I have coming out of this project are being able to more accurately estimate how long a project like this will take me to complete, and to fully digitize my workflow. I’ve been experimenting with some digital watercolor brushes by Max Ulichney and am excited to use them on future projects!

To hear more about the author’s side of the process from Tracy Hyde, check out this podcast episode.

Detective Murray is available for purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Jack-O-Lanterns 2023

Here are the Jack-O-Lanterns I created for the Minnesota Zoo in my third year on the show. The theme for the 2023 show included a lot of Minnesota-centric topics, and I got back in the groove of carving animals. I also did a super wrapped-around design of Lake Superior Agates — that one definitely took the longest! Many of the pumpkins this year were absolutely mammoth. My availability didn’t allow me to complete as many carvings in the 2023 show. Going forward I’m going to aim to reserve some time off from my day job to make sure I can get in to the studio more.

If you want to learn more about the show and the process of creating these Jack-O-Lanterns, see my post All About Pumpkin Carving!

Jack-O-Lanterns 2022

Here are the Jack-O-Lanterns I created for the Minnesota Zoo in my second year on the show. There were a lot of pop-culture pumpkins in the show this year that piqued my interest, but I still did get a red panda done as well (they are, after all, my favorite). The designs I picked generally took quite a bit longer than the animal pumpkins I did last year as they had a lot more small details. I used the darkroom and projector at the studio a lot more this year for image placement, sometimes combining multiple images to create a composition. I pushed myself to use a larger surface of the pumpkin and wrap the design around more, so it was tricky to try to capture all the details into a still image! I had to include a few extra detail shots of my second Zelda pumpkin of the season — I was really pleased with how that one turned out especially.

If you want to learn more about the show and the process of creating these Jack-O-Lanterns, see my post All About Pumpkin Carving!

Dragon Summoner Coloring Page

The Minnesota Renaissance Festival held a coloring book contest this year and I decided to throw my hat in the ring.

I am normally wary of art contests as they can be exploitative, but for this contest everyone who submitted a piece was mailed at least one free admission ticket, with two tickets to entries that made it into the book, and a free season pass to the winners of the contest. Overall, prizes felt very reasonable and worth the effort.

Here is my Dragon Summoner piece! It did make it into the book and I got two free admission tickets out of the deal. I’m also offering the coloring page as a free/pay what you want download.

If you're interested you can download it here! I’d love see the finished product. Have fun!

JuneToon 2022

The JuneToon challenge consists of a list of prompts for each day of the month of June, with an overall focus on cartoon characters. I decided to translate all the prompts into the closest Pokémon I could think of — some were definitely easier than others.

Every time I have tackled a month-long challenge there are many times I think “Why am I putting myself through this?” as it is a LOT of work, and I definitely fell behind and had to catch up a lot throughout the month.

Overall, glad I did the challenge and am happy with the results!

Jack-O-Lanterns 2021

Here are the Jack-O-Lanterns I created for the Minnesota Zoo in my first year on the show. I am not always able to get pictures of the lit pumpkins, but I try my best because nothing beats seeing the finished product all lit up on the trail! The unlit pumpkins are a bit challenging to take glare-free pictures of due to the shiny nature of alcohol ink and the lighting situation at the studio. It’s been really rewarding to see my progress in the medium from the first pumpkin of the season to the last, as well as growth each year that I work the show. The 2021 show had tons of animal pumpkins in it and it was a blast bringing these lanterns to life!

If you want to learn more about the show and the process of creating these Jack-O-Lanterns, see my post All About Pumpkin Carving!

Mighty Nein

I am very much a fan of Critical Role — I started listening to their first campaign Vox Machina a few summers ago, and that’s actually how I got into Dungeons and Dragons and started to learn the game. I was able to finish campaign one and get caught up on campaign two just in time to watch the last few episodes live. It was super fun being able to watch Exandria Unlimited this summer and keep ahead of spoilers for once, and I am eagerly awaiting campaign three!

Anyways, it was high time I drew some fan art from the series, so here are the Mighty Nein! I started them as individual ink drawings, but after drawing a few decided they needed to be in a group shot together. After finishing the inks, I scanned them in and colored them digitally. Figuring out the color scheme on this was challenging but a lot of fun!

mightynein_web.png

Linktober 2020

Decided to do a different art challenge this October and follow the Linktober prompt list. I didn’t get all 31 of them in, but it was a nice change of pace to not stress over quite as high of an output and instead focus on playing with different mediums: gouache, marker, pen, colored pencil, and digital.

Glitch Techs

Couldn’t resist doing some fan art of High Five and Miko when season two of Glitch Techs came out. I used Copic markers for the color on both of these. If you haven’t had a chance to check the show out on Netflix, I highly recommend it!

Chromatic Critters

I got some gouache paints for my birthday this year and wanted to take them out on a spin to test them out. We are about to move into our first house, so I decided to make some art for my son’s bedroom.

I kept the color scheme simple for each piece, and just used a main color plus black and white to tint and shade the paint.

Animal Hybrids Project

(Inktober 2017)

I wanted to do something inventive for the Inktober challenge this year, so I decided to design some creatures inspired by the official prompt list.

I started by writing down each prompt in my sketchbook, and listing a few animals that each prompt brought to mind. For each creature design, I did studies of the real-world animals used for inspiration. Finally, I designed a hybrid animal using a mixture the traits of the real world animals.

Sketches of real-world animals
Final hybrid creature designs

31 Days of Como

(Inktober 2016)

For the Inktober drawing challenge in 2016 I decided to try out a new artistic medium — sumi ink.  Many traditional sumi brush paintings draw their themes from nature, so I decided to do daily paintings of the creatures of Como Zoo Park Zoo and Conservatory in Saint Paul.

Each painting was created with sumi ink and a bamboo brush, white gel pen, and black multiliner pens of different sizes.
Time lapse videos of each piece are posted on my YouTube page. Prints of the artwork are available for sale, contact me if you are interested.

Pokémon Starters

I never got into Pokémon growing up, but when Pokémon GO came out this summer I finally jumped on the bandwagon. Here are some watercolors I made of the original starters.