Pumpkin Carving with Adam Bierton

[Music] my name is adam bearton and we are at the new york botanical garden at the edible academy i went to school the arts up in rochester new york and right before i graduated i started playing with pumpkins and trying to apply all my sculptural knowledge into this medium i've been doing this for my entire life but i've been professionally pumpkin carving for about 10 years i was picked up by a local pumpkin carving crew became professional pumpkin carver the food network reached out to me and asked me to participate in halloween wars which i ended up winning season five with the scream team go scream team and then from there i participated in another spin-off called halloween wars hayride of horror which was awesome i've been here at the garden for the last couple years doing these demonstrations and they're great fun and i can't wait to get into more details and show you all the tips and tricks of a professional pumpkin carver we're going to be using some sharp tools today so make sure that there's an adult present [Music] when it comes to picking your pumpkin there's a lot of good things to look for and it really depends on what style of carbon you're going to be doing the traditional jack-o-lantern is done on an orange varietal it's your most common pumpkin everybody's familiar with and there's there's some great indicators to show what a what a good pumpkin is when i'm searching for a pumpkin i'm looking for a really long green healthy stem uh you'll see a lot of the ones at the supermarkets are brown and short not to say that those are bad pumpkins but if you can find one with a long green stem that indicates that it's fresh next when you're searching for a pumpkin you really want to find a healthy lookie looking pumpkin something with a nice bright orange finish and maybe a semi-smooth texture beyond that there's some other indicators on here at the top of the stem you might see some mold or some mildew kind of grow in there and you kind of want to uh avoid that if you can you can see how this one is nice and dry same thing on the bottom of the pumpkin finding a nice fresh pumpkin green stem no mild uh no mold or mildew and uh and you know you're in good shape [Music] now this is the best way to scoop your pumpkin traditionally you would cut a hole around the top of the stem and pick it off and scoop out from the top nothing wrong with that i like to think that the stem has a lot of the character of the pumpkin and that's what i like to bring to life so more recently in the professional pumpkin carving world uh i've stopped car uh cutting a hole in the top primarily uh and go in the back of the pumpkin so you wanna find the face of your pumpkin where you wanna do your design and go right on the opposite of that and you'll see we're going to do a hexagon shape big enough to fit your hand in and i'm just using a pen here this is just a pilot pen you can use a magic marker probably don't want to use a permanent marker because then it wouldn't wipe off but these pens right here are great and you can see that i'm going to do a hexagon shape one two three four five six and that's just a guideline of where i want to go and you can adjust from there i'm using a basic paring knife it's nice and sharp again be careful make sure that you have an adult with you and i'm going to hold the pumpkin by the stem and keep it stable on the table and use back and forth sawing motions right on the lines that i've already pre-drawn and we want to go all the way out all the way around the trick is is that you want to over cut your previous cut line so then that way it'll pop out easier not missing anything so i'm just going over just a little bit just to be safe i'm going to use the tip of my knife just to kind of wedge in here and pry this thing open again be very careful you don't want to hurt yourself on this pro and you can see all the guts in the pumpkin and now we're gonna scoop uh i have two examples of our scoopers here this is an avocado scoop that i got uh at the grocery store and this is a more basic uh pumpkin scooper that you can find and what i wanna do is i want to just get all of this stringy guts right off of the entire pumpkin now you can save some of these guts for later because these can kind of be a cool addition to your to your carbon you can kind of you know make them hang out of the mouth or something um they're they're really fun um and beyond that pumpkin seeds are great and they're tasty and you can cook them um so what i do is i like to clean up our little square and i even put a little chamfer on these edges because believe it or not the cleaner the inside of your pumpkin the longer uh the pumpkin will stay alive and fresh because all that rot and mildew is going to start on this stringy stuff that's where the mold starts and and once it starts you can't stop it so what you want to do is use these tools and get right in there don't be scared [Music] it's looking pretty clean in here just gonna do one more pass make sure there's nothing loose in there okay i don't know if you can get in there but that is one clean pumpkin you can see that there's no stringy stringy mess or any seeds in there and i have a little pro tip here this is lemon juice and water and it's going to be a great little antibacterial to prevent the mold from growing similar to how you would put a potato and lemon juice to keep it from turning brown same idea we're just going to mist the inside of the pumpkin as well as this little piece and that's going to prevent all that decay from happening and then i'll keep this handy for when i'm carving too and uh and use it throughout my piece [Applause] [Music] so first things first is we want to think of a design i usually look at the pumpkin for the design rather than getting a set idea in my head before i choose my pumpkin i think that some of these misshaped pumpkins have a lot of character in them and it's good to just kind of look at him and see if he's a happy pumpkin if he's sad if he's angry all of those things are really fun and i think that this guy looks happy what i want to do is find the center of my pumpkin here and just kind of see maybe where his mouth is going to end up and i feel like this guy's got a big grin i'm going to kind of over exaggerate his mouth maybe it goes all the way down to the bottom here again our traditional jack-o-lanterns are very easy you still want to have some type of guideline here to see where you're cutting and you don't have to be committed to this drawing it's just kind of a rough idea of where you want to start and you can adjust from there so maybe there's a little curl at the end of his mouth and we want to make sure that we're trying to line this up correctly here's one of my tools that i'm going to use today this is a an ice cream scoop that i got from uh the the grocery store and i've just kind of removed some of the guts the little clicker part and this is a perfect circle and you can see on some of my other demo pumpkins here that i have these white eyes which i'm gonna cover in a little later in the tutorial but those are actually potatoes and carrots and this is the tool that i use what i'm going to do is i'm just going to push into the pumpkin just to kind of get a guide of where where his eyes are going to be maybe they're close together but instead of two full eyes i'm also going to draw over these marks again that was just a guide to give me a perfect circle on here because otherwise drawing a perfect circle is nearly impossible and then from here if he if we wanted to give this guy teeth we could add in some big jagged teeth like this some more jack-o'-lanterns style maybe it's got two big fangs maybe some little teeth down here these would all be great to lay out if you're going to leave those in with the skin my idea is that i'm gonna blend some of these carving techniques for you today so uh you kind of get a whole roundabout picture of uh of all the styles of carving so uh instead of leaving the teeth like i have on this jack-o-lantern um i'm going to do an etching style for the mouth we'll jack-o-lantern his eyes and then maybe later in the demonstration we can play with some other materials to kind of enhance this carving it's really important to have a nice sharp knife make sure you're being super careful and you have adult supervision if you're doing this at home um but you're actually more likely to cut yourself with a dull knife than a sharp knife believe it or not so make sure you're being careful i'm going to use my paring knife for this there's other fancier knives that you could use this is one of my detailing knives and even beyond that this is an x-acto blade which is again very standard stuff at an art supply store or online and maybe i'll start with this again what i want to do is i want to try to create a perfect circle here i have my guideline drawn in so i'm going to open up this eye first for you and the wall of this pumpkin is much thicker than this little tiny knife however i'm not worried about the wall of the pumpkin i'm really just worried about the skin the skin is the toughest part of the pumpkin and once you get past the skin the interior the pumpkin is lovely and juicy and perfect for carving so really i just want to make sure my cut is through the skin of the pumpkin and then we'll worry about the rest after depending on the thickness of your blade it could be helpful to use your scraper tool to thin out the wall of this pumpkin that way you're not fighting with a really thick piece of a pumpkin uh especially when you're trying to remove the jack-o-lantern so when we're in that scooping stage you can kind of take a lot of material away to help yourself i'm just going to go back over my cuts again until i feel it loosen up i'm actually going to go in from the back here try to pop this guy there she is you can see some of that interior wall and i'm just going to save this for later just in case i want to use it and what i'm going to do is i'm going to just use my regular paring knife here and go back in and clean up this this circle and that's a nice perfect circle you can see all the way through with that light and if i cover it up with our piece here it'll go dark again and that's number one and on to number two i'm actually going to use this style of blade just to get a little bit better penetration here and again you can see i have my hand on the pumpkin with my thumb out and i'm actually holding my hand so i'm not jumping around rather than just going in with a loosey goosey hand you have a point of stability here now that's your traditional jack-o-lantern right you're going all the way through to the interior of the pumpkin you can light that with a candle and you'd look really spooky at night uh for the mouth instead of cutting out this whole shape all the way through i'm actually gonna employ an etching style where we're only just going to be taking off the skin of the pumpkin this is going to allow me to use some of this flesh to sculpt and maybe give him the teeth so his teeth won't have this this fleshy skin on it but it'll be more of this bright orange uh and you can kind of see it on this little dude here i've kind of done the same idea so this could be done with an exacto blade or a paring knife and you would you would literally just trace the line but you wouldn't go all the way through if you'd like to make your life easier this is a handy little tool it's a linoleum cutter by speedball and uh these are available online or at an art store and this has a little groove in it um these are for printmaking but they work wonders on pumpkin uh and i'm just gonna again trace my line with this outer outer blade being very careful stabilizing myself with my thumb you can see how this kind of just grooves right in and pops the skin off and i'm going to end it here and save that little detail for for later all right so we have our mouth kind of roughed in and i can continue to use this tool to scrape the skin off you can see how it makes little lines and these little these little drops are actually really cool you could save these and you know use them as hair or a mustache i mean the whole idea of pumpkin carving is that you get creative use your imagination and don't take it too seriously the next uh tool i'm going to use is a clay lube these these tools are for clay sculpting and again can be found at any art store or online and they come in a variety of different shapes and sizes all the way down to a little teeny weeny one so what we're going to do is i'm going to start with this triangle and i'm going to pull away from our line i want to be careful not to mess up this nice crisp line [Music] i'm going to drop down to a smaller tool for our more detailed areas so don't mess up [Music] with the right tool and once you get past the skin that's the really hard part this nice meaty flesh sculpts really easy and these clay tubes are perfect for it just kind of dragging these tools across the surface of the pumpkin just shaving it off you can see i'm just taking small amounts off right now [Music] and we're going to do a little bit of a blend here between a sculpt and a jack-o-lantern so i'm going to go all the way through in some parts of this mouth but leave some of this meat for teeth and gums and whatever else you could leave some area for a tongue [Music] now you won't be able to draw on this surface because it's too moist um so really what you're going to do is draw with one of these tools you could use the back side of a tool and kind of mark this this area but i just want to get a gum line of maybe about a an inch three quarters of an inch [Music] i might remove the majority of this so you can see right through i'll use my trusty paring knife here and i'm actually going to leave more than i want even though i've drawn the line up here i'm actually going to cut below it because you can't put the material back on but you could take it out and i might actually just for fun leave a little square here maybe he's got an orange tooth [Music] this guy's looking good for a jack-o'-lantern style carve again i've left some of this meat in here for sculpting which is great and hopefully you can stick around i'm going to add some more edible materials to this guy and develop on them and hopefully you can see the final [Music] result [Music] [Applause] [Music] last time we left off we were just a basic kind of jack-o'-lantern uh carving i left some of this meat down here um for some teeth and some gums um and i went ahead and i've been using uh pieces of potato and carrot and anything else i can find to kind of bring more life to this pumpkin so i have a potato and a carrot eyeball um i don't know getting rid of that pumpkin toot that i left there before and just kind of recreating it with pieces of pumpkin all these have been dipped in that lemon juice slurry uh to keep them nice and white maybe i skipped over a few so those ones will turn brown and give it even more character and yeah some some some sticky kind of viny arms and uh i don't know what you think but uh this guy's pretty cool thanks so much for joining us and uh please feel free to follow me on instagram at adam bearton i'd love to see all your wonderful creations you can tag me and hashtag nybg thanks for joining us and happy halloween everyone

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Views: 58,040

Rating: 4.8141265 out of 5

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Id: z-5W4Ctjkuw

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020