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Happy fall, y’all! We’re coming at you with the only pumpkin carving tutorial you’ll ever need. We’re going to be looking at five simple designs today, and I’m going to give you all the tips and tricks I use to make perfect Halloween jack-o’-lanterns. [Disclaimer: Many of the below pumpkins may end up looking like Danny DeVito, regardless of your intentions.]

Before we dive into specific designs, I’d like to share what tools I work with when carving my pumpkins.

Soup spoon, X-ACTO knife set, large butcher knife, permanent marker, scissors.

Start things off by cutting off the top of the pumpkin with the knife pointing inwards, so the “cap” won’t slide down into the opening. Then, I scoop out the guts with my hands (save those seeds for roasting!). The final prep step is taking a metal soup spoon to the inside wall of the pumpkin to scrape the sides and take off a little bit of the flesh. This makes it easier to see your final design.

The first design we’re going to do is a spooky cat.

You’ll first want to print out the design and tape it to your pumpkin.

Hmm, this doesn’t look quite … right…

Then you will slowly trace the outline with a permanent marker. The goal is to have the ink bleed through the paper onto the pumpkin. After that, use an X-ACTO knife to (carefully!) trace around the space you’re “carving” out.

It’ll start looking like this:

I’m sorry about this face, it should be a cat … maybe my printer had something stuck in it from a previous job?

When you start carving, use a blade with a flat edge, if you can, to lift off the actual skin. You’re not so much carving as just peeling the orange skin off to expose the flesh. Take your time, and put on your favorite spooky movie.

(I carved these while watching Batman Returns)

These steps should work for whatever you’d like to carve. Let’s try another spoooky scene … like this ghost!

Nothing says Halloween like a cute little ghost! Just print out the template and pop it on your pumpkin, then start carving … wait, what the fuck? It’s another Danny DeVito jack-o’-lantern.

I don’t even know what happened. I remember sending the template to my printer to print, and then I just woke up with my flashlight in this second Danny DeVito pumpkin. That reminds me: Since you’re not actually cutting any holes in these pumpkins, you’ll need a brighter light source than candles to really make them pop. Anyway, let’s try this ghost one more time.

Am I possessed? Is my printer haunted? Or is this some weird Idle Hands-type situation? I don’t know what’s going on here. I keep trying to carve this shitty fucking Pac Man–looking ghost, and I keep waking up to a fully carved Danny DeVito. Ugh. Okay, look I’m just going to try and freehand a bat.

My daughter is dying for a Pikachu pumpkin. That’s all she wanted me to carve this year. I’m going to do this. We’re going to be okay. It’s okay. Everything is okkkkkaaaay..

Get your DeVito jack-o’-lantern Templates and view the hi-res photos here on IMGUR, and tag us @BunnyEarsWeb in your DeVito carvings!

You can follow Emily on Twitter @Nomtastic. Big thanks to Adri Leighty for scooping out all those pumpkin guts.

Images: Kidster

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