Pumpkin Stencils

💀1 Face🕯️2 Light🎭3 Look🎃4 Carve

Let's start

🧰 What you'll need - a pumpkin, a printer, a few kitchen tools
What are you carving?
👆 Pick one to start - we'll show you how to take a photo that carves well.
🎁 Just want a go?
Try the whole thing with one of our photos - every light and look, the sliders and the PDF. Free, no sign-in.

Pick a light

Where the light comes from decides what glows.

Pick a look

Standard or drawn by AI?
Tap a picture to choose. Standard cuts the light and shadow of the portrait: bold, simple shapes. Drawn by AI draws it like a hand-cut pattern: hair as strands, eyes, eyebrows and smile lines kept, more detail to carve, and the Dramatic look. Two credits instead of one; Easy↔Hard and shading still work, the light slider is off.
Pick a face first. Tap a look here and the pumpkin is made.
More options - for grown-ups: the settings the pictures choose for you
Carve style Pattern Detail
Your pumpkin × cm Tell me its size and the pattern is sized to fit it.
Crop
Light it like a photo of your own (optional):
Fine-tune
Full resolution (slower)
Expression / angle / lighting steer the AI portrait (the from-above light patterns best). Difficulty sets saw limits: beginner = wide cuts & thick bridges, expert = fine detail. Blank seed = same photo & settings always recreate the same pattern.
❓ How it works & what the options mean

Turn any face photo into a printable, guaranteed-carvable pumpkin pattern in three steps:

  1. Upload a photo. It's analysed automatically (glasses, beard, hair are spotted and preserved). Photos with strong directional light work best; the crop mode trims it to the face for you.
  2. Pick a style card (or fine-tune below). The AI redraws your photo as a Halloween portrait, then it's converted into a pattern. Each generation takes a few minutes on the local GPU — the card shows progress.
  3. Download. The result page gives you a print-ready PDF (true physical size, calibration ruler, carving instructions), an SVG cut file, the pattern PNG, and a glowing-pumpkin preview.

Carve style — Classic cut-through: every gray shape is sawed all the way through (the traditional Zombie-Pumpkins look). Shaded (3-tone): adds a second tier where you only shave the skin with a gouge for a dim glow — more portrait-like, more work to carve.

Pattern — Deterministic: the portrait is converted with classical image processing; the same photo + settings always gives the exact same pattern. AI artistic: a generative pass invents a more stylised design — creative, but different every seed and often busier.

Detail — caps how complex the pattern can get, like commercial patterns: Simple ≈ up to 18 bold shapes (easiest to carve, reads best from a distance), Standard ≈ 35, Detailed ≈ 60 (needs a steady hand).

Crop — what part of the photo is used: Auto picks for you (face found → head & shoulders, otherwise the most interesting region), Portrait/Face frame the person, Smart keeps the subject plus its scene, Full uses everything.

Fine-tune panel — Expression / Angle / Lighting steer the AI portrait (the rembrandt lighting gives the cleanest patterns). Difficulty sets real-world saw limits: beginner = wide cuts and thick bridges, expert = fine detail. Width is the printed size in mm. Seed: leave blank for reproducible results — the same photo and settings recreate the same pattern; type any number to explore variations.

The carvable guarantee — whatever the AI produces, a deterministic engine repairs it: floating pieces get bridges (like real patterns), cuts too thin to saw are removed, fragile strands are thickened, and it won't return a pattern that would fall apart. The verdict line shows shape count, cut percentage and any warnings (e.g. "shell may be weak" when a lot is cut away).

Printing — print the PDF at 100% scale and check the calibration bar measures exactly 100 mm. Tape it on, poke holes along the lines, and follow the carving steps printed on the sheet.

My pumpkins

Saved for you for 30 days. Tap one to see it again, then change its light or look.

Carve it!

Carve it!

details
your pumpkin, glowing
📄 Get the PDF to print
Change it
easy: a few big shapes hard: many small shapes
🌘 ☀️
Show the pattern and the portrait
print pattern
Print pattern — black = cut through, gray = shave, white = leave
AI portrait
AI portrait
How to carve it
  1. The printed sheet held up to a pumpkin, to scale🖨️ Print at 100% - the ruler on the sheet should be 10 cm.
  2. The pattern trimmed, taped on, holes poked along the lines📌 Trim the paper close, tape it on, and poke holes along every line.
  3. A dot outline left on the skin👀 Peel it off: a dot outline is left. Rub flour on to see it better.
  4. The cuts done and the shaded areas scraped with a gouge🔪 Saw the dark grey shapes first, smallest first, plugs in until the end. Then shade: outline each light grey area with a V-gouge and scrape the skin off inside it with a U-gouge or loop tool (6-10 mm). A light grey bar across a cut area holds a piece up: scrape it, never cut it.
  5. Cut Shade Keep outside inside skin + a few mm ~2.5 cm bright dim glow dark 📏 How deep: cut goes right through; shade takes only the skin and a few millimetres of flesh - never through; keep is untouched. Shading only glows where the wall is thin: scrape the inside behind it to about 2.5 cm. Check with a torch inside - thinner glows brighter.
  6. The carved pumpkin, lit🔪 Saw the shapes, smallest first, plugs in until the end. Then light it!

🪥 A piece or bridge snapped off? Push a toothpick through it from the inside and into the pumpkin to hold it back in place - it's hidden once the pumpkin is lit.