Halloween

I carved a lot of jack-o'-lanterns this year:

I really like how the four around the big one turned out, but I'm not as sure of the big one itself. It was supposed to be two faces, split down the middle --- one grinning, one scary. I'm thinking now that that might've come across better if I'd made some sort of division between the faces: a positive/negative space thing or some kind of dividing line, like a jagged scar or something.

Here I am holding it, if you want a closer look:

It's Gollum!

So I only carved one jack-o'-lantern this year --- it's a measure of how excited/worried I am about this election that Halloween has almost completely slipped my mind this year --- but I'm really pleased with the way it turned out, and I did remember to take lots of pictures at different stages of the process.

I decided I wanted to carve it in the likeness of Gollum from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as he appears in the "Lord of the Rings" movies.

This is the picture I worked from:

This is my negative-space interpretation* of that picture, after I had finished transferring it to the pumpkin by taping my drawing to it and poking zillions of little holes all along every line. 

Here, I have recreated the negative-space drawing on the pumpkin by tracing over the pin-holes with a Sharpie:

And here is the finished project:

Finally, here it is all lit up:

Happy Halloween!!

*Drawing from the movie still, I actually produced a line drawing first, and then turned that into a negative-space drawing so that my lines would actually show up on a jack-o'-lantern. It occurs to me now that I ought to have scanned the original line drawing, but whatever.

Jack-o'-Lanterns

As I'm sure most longtime readers know, Halloween is my favorite holiday. I always put a lot of thought into jack-o'-lantern designs, and this year, since I didn't have an enormous behemoth of a pumpkin to lavish attention on like I did last year, I carved five small ones.

Here's a shark:

(You can see he's got a double row of teeth there! Had to make sure I picked a thick-shelled pumpkin for that one, so that the second row would sit back behind the first).

Here's a ghoul, with a gaunt, bony face, snaggle teeth and stringy hair falling over its face:

(One of the hairs broke when I was carving the mouth).

Here's a mummy; I peeled the whole face of the pumpkin and tried to do the bandages in a sort of relief, so that they would stand out despite all being the same color. I didn't really see it as I was carving them --- they seem to blend into each other when you look close at it --- but they stand out more from a distance.

There's a second eye socket carved in there, too --- I wanted to give the impression it was covered in gauze, so I didn't cut that eye out. When the pumpkin is lit, that socket glows faintly.

Here's one of an evil smiling face, with long sharp teeth.

Here's me, pretending I'm going to throw it at someone:
And here's me holding the last pumpkin in my lap. It's the smallest one, so I didn't want to try to carve anything too elaborate into it.
I settled for simple, but eloquent, I think. The shape of the mouth, and the size of the eyes relative to the mouth, give the impression that this pumpkin is afraid of its bigger, scarier siblings.

Awesome Website: Take Back Halloween!

Suzie posted a link to this wonderful website today on Echidne's blog; the site is called Take Back Halloween!, and it's full of cool ideas for Halloween costumes based on powerful female figures from history and mythology.

(The name, Take Back Halloween!, refers to the current trend for women's Halloween costumes to be a "sexy" version of some generic category or character: I've blogged before about unimaginatively "sexy" superhero costumes. The ladies at Take Back Halloween! want to see more thoughtful, creative, personalized Halloween costumes; it's not sexiness per se but rather homogeneity and lack of imagination in Halloween costumes that they lament. See the Take Back Halloween! About page for more details.)

My favorite costume on that site, so far, is actually one that had occurred to me before as someone it would be cool, and relatively easy, to dress up as: the famous female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Here's what Take Back Halloween! says about her:

Hatshepsut (ca. 1508-1458 BCE) was an extremely successful pharaoh whose reign was full of accomplishments --- important trade missions, gorgeous architecture, a booming economy. But the thing she's most famous for, at least nowadays, is that she had herself depicted as male on her monuments. There she is, King Hatshepsut, striding across the ancient bas reliefs with her broad shoulders and her beard ... it's a little weird until you understand what's going on. The role of pharaoh was gendered male in ancient Egypt, and Hatshepsut was just assuming the badges of office. She wasn't pretending to be personally male, and the texts unmistakably refer to her as female: "she" is the beloved "daughter" of Amun, destined to rule, and so forth. But Egyptian iconography and religion called for the pharaoh to have a male form, and so Hatshepsut had herself depicted with beard, kilt, the whole bit.

Take Back Halloween! suggests a standard dime-store Egyptian Queen costume, with the stripey headdress of a pharaoh substituted for whatever crown the costume comes with.

My own idea, when I conceived of a Hatshepsut costume, was to dress as the masculinized "King Hatshepsut" character --- fake beard, stripey headdress, crook and flail, pleated linen kilt, boobs bound down with a strip of the same material I'd used for the kilt. (This would be, obviously, only practical if the weather was warm, or if I was going to wear it to a party or other indoor event. In Kansas, it is usually too cold at night in late October to be running around outside with that little clothing on).
I would also wear a cardboard cartouche around my neck on a string, with (if I could find them) the hieroglyphs spelling Hatshepsut's name painted on it.

Another thing I thought would be fun to add to this costume, to throw a little gamer-geekery into the mix, would be to wear shoes evoking the "Freudian slippers" card from Munchkin, which allow your character in that game to function as whatever gender you say they are, even both at the same time. I thought that would be particularly a propos for Hatshepsut, who is female, but yet also male in her role as Pharaoh.

They also have lots of ideas for mythological-character costumes, which is another area of geekery that is dear to my heart. I was actually just pondering the best way to make a Gorgon costume that wasn't just a bunch of rubber snakes braided into one's hair --- the Gorgons, depending on what version of the myth you're reading, might have talons of bronze, wings of gold, and tusks like a wild boar or hippopotamus, or they might just be scaly and dragonlike; either way, "normal-looking woman with snakes on her head" falls short of the level of fearsomeness required.

Unfortunately, their Medusa costume is just a snake wig and a coat. Blah.

But they've got an impressive array of ancient-goddess costume ideas: there's the winged Egyptian goddess Isis, the Mayan goddess Ix Chel, the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu, and the Sumerian goddess Inanna. And those are only the goddesses I'd heard of before going to the site!

In Which A Quaint American Folkway Is Alluded To

He saw his shadow! Woohoo!

(Announcement and photo courtesy of National Geographic Daily News website).

Neurodiversity-Themed Christmas Graphic by Kowalski

Kowalski has created this lovely holiday image (with one of my vintage magazine-illustration scans as a centerpiece --- yay teamwork!) in response to some of the more obnoxious autism- and other disability-awareness themed Christmas swag:

Halloween

I love Halloween. It's always been my favorite holiday, for lots of reasons. Anymore, my primary mode of celebrating it is to carve outrageous jack-o'-lanterns, the bigger the better.

Here's this year's entry in the "Holy $#?! that's a huge pumpkin" arms race with myself, being interrogated by two of the cats.

You can see they're a bit mystified as to what manner of thing the humans have brought them this time. (The third cat loathes the smell of pumpkin, so she fled the scene).

Boots (the black-and-white one pictured above) was able to discover fairly quickly that this pumpkin was big enough for him to jump into:

Of course, it didn't take him very long after making this discovery for him to lose interest entirely and wander off, as cats will do. But he made this very eloquent expression of disdain before he left:

(It's like he's trying to wave it away with his paw. So cute!)

How *NOT* to Do Superhero Halloween Costumes

CaitieCat at Shakesville linked this somewhat hilaristurbing Comics Alliance article about Disguise Costumes' new line* of Marvel-superhero-themed women's Halloween costumes.

What could be more awesome than having a wider selection of ready-to-wear Marvel superhero costumes? Well, like Comics Alliance's Nick Nadel writes, it'd be a lot more awesome if these costumes actually looked much like the characters they're supposed to portray.

For example, there are three characters in the Marvel universe who might be considered female equivalents of Spider-Man: first, there's Spider-Woman**, who looks like this:

There's also Spider-Girl, who was introduced in a "What If?" one-shot comic, as the superpowered daughter of Spider-Man and his true love Mary Jane Watson. She dresses more or less exactly like her father does, in the blue-and-red spider suit:
Finally, there's Araña (Spanish for "spider"). She's a teenage girl with spider powers, and she dresses in street clothes with a spider motif:
None of these amazing characters look even a little bit like this, however.

This is more or less the pattern for all the characters featured in this line: make a standard-issue Sexy (Whatever) costume, with short skirt, bustier/crop top, and tall, vertiginously high-heeled boots, and add little details to evoke the character. Thus, Spider-Girl here looks more or less like the Black Cat looks more or less like Emma Frost looks more or less like American Dream. Only in Emma Frost's case is the resulting costume anywhere near resembling something the character in question would actually wear: hers is, if anything, a bit more modest than the outfit she wore for all those years as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club!

But the most WTF-inducing part of that article, for me at least, was this.

Sexy Venom?! That really, really does not compute.

It does not compute, because Venom looks like this:

You try to make that cute and attractive, and I'd argue you lost sight of the essence of the character a long time ago.

(In answer to your no-doubt-unasked question, "What's even more hilaristurbing than a Sexy Venom costume?", I give you a commenter at Comics Alliance's assertion that the blonde young woman modeling the Sexy Venom costume is none other than Carrie Prejean, Miss Anti-Gay California herself. How weird is that?)

*I was only able to find one of the costumes --- this one, the Sexy Cheerleader version of Captain America with the shield maybe a third the size of the one the model is holding --- on Marvel's own website, so it looks like the Women of Marvel line is mostly Disguise Costumes' brainchild. The Comics Alliance article gives the impression that Marvel is involved, but Disguise's website just says the costumes are "inspired" by Marvel superheroines, and you'd think that if Marvel had any role in designing the costumes, that they'd also be selling them on their site, which they're not.

**There have been multiple Spider-Women over the course of Marvel canon, but I am referring to Jessica Drew, the first, current and --- I believe --- longest-running holder of the title.

Halloween

I know, it's not exactly timely to post about Halloween in mid-November. But I just got these pictures off my sister's camera, and I thought you all (particularly those in areas without seasons, or whose seasons occur at opposite times of the year from mine) might appreciate some fall-foliage pics.

We have five trees in our backyard --- a maple, an ash, two oaks and a black walnut. The maple is the most spectacular:

Also, every year I carve at least one pumpkin, usually a lot more. Last year, I carved five or six of them at my boyfriend's house (actually a group home for developmentally disabled adults where his roommate worked --- she and I together carved 10 or 12, and placed them out for the residents to admire). Then I came home and carved a likeness of Darth Vader for my own doorstep. (That was a great year!)

This year was nothing like that: I did two, and fairly simple designs, although one was fairly time-consuming, since I had to peel off the skin on all the teeth:

Here I am with both of them, which I named Mr. Teeth and the Zombie Pumpkin. (Yes, I always name at least one of my pumpkins --- last year featured El Gordo, Darth Pumpkin and the Imperial Gourdsmen). You can probably tell which one Mr. Teeth is.

Have a Scienterrific V-Day!

Check out these scientist-themed valentines!

Via Pharyngula.

An example: