Silica

The dragon-taming player of Aincrad.

Behind the carving

About this piece

I was starting to feel pretty confident that I could carve anything and a friend asked me if I could do Silica from Sword Art Online, so I did. The image contains not only a lot of hair, but also bird feathers: two of the most notoriously tedious textures to carve. There are many fantastic stories and characters in anime to put on pumpkins, but I do dread doing them a little for this reason.

Carving notes

If you look closely, you'll see some of the shape edges have a perforated or serrated look. This is the still-visible result of poking big holes through the stencil and then cutting through the center of them. I've since learned to be careful not to punch too hard and also to err on the inside of the shape lines during stencil transfer, and err on the outside of the holes when cutting shapes so that they don't appear in the final product.