30 October 2008

It's Rabbit Season!!!

It's been a few years since I've taken the couple of hours to carve a pumpkin for Halloween,1 but TheWife bought one this year so I figured I'd go ahead and do something. My first thought was a McCain pumpkin - that beautiful lizard-y shot of him at the final debate seemed like a good idea - but here in AZ that might get me shot. So I decided to not do a political carving at all. But then what?

A Terminator pumpkin would be pretty cool, so I went looking for a good shot of Arnie with his face half ripped off. I'd probably want to augment that carving with a red LED, but it could be pretty cool. Unfortunately, the photos I could find were all half in shadow, so when I dropped them to B&W and tried applying the Threshold filter, no matter which way I did them, I'd end up with huge swaths cut out. That's fine and dandy, right up until you need to leave an eye in the middle. So short of drawing my own, or spending a few hours just on image manipulation, it was no-go. What then...ah.

Daffy Duck.

I did a quick search and found this mediocre, low-res gif2


and after about 20 minutes in the Gimp I had a usable three-tone pattern.

Here it is out on the front step, first with flash...


and then all lit up...
I think it came out okay for only a couple hours.

1 comments:

karigee said...

Bravo!