A jack-o'-lantern is built from shapes you already know. Three triangles for the eyes and nose, a row of Vs for the teeth, and a handful of curves for the pumpkin around them. Nothing to measure. Five minutes with a marker and you have one.
The steps below follow Cartooning Club How to Draw's Halloween pumpkin lesson, filmed from overhead so you can see where every line goes. The thing worth copying from it is the order. Face first, pumpkin second. Most people go the other way, draw a big round outline, then find there is no room left for the grin.
The ribs are what make it a pumpkin
A circle with a face on it is a ball. The ribs turn it into a pumpkin - those curved bands running from the stem down the sides. Get them placed right and the shape reads round with no shading at all.
Work from the centre outward. The middle rib sits under the stem and runs close to vertical. The next one on each side leans away and stops higher up the base. The outer pair curve hardest and end short of the bottom, disappearing behind the bands in front. That overlap is the whole illusion. When one band vanishes behind another, your eye decides it is wrapping around the back.
Evenly spaced ribs running straight down read as beach-ball stripes. Tighten the gaps toward the outer edge instead, and the pumpkin swells.
Plain pumpkin or carved face - pick before the first line
The two are drawn in opposite orders. A plain pumpkin goes outline, ribs, stem, because the shape is the subject. A jack-o'-lantern goes face, ribs, outline, because the face sets the scale for everything after it.
Going plain? Skip the triangle steps and lay two light curves across the front where the face would have been, so the surface still bulges toward you. Going carved? Commit on the first mark. A face added to a finished pumpkin lands too small and too high almost every time, and marker does not come off.
The classic triangle face versus a toothier one
Two triangle eyes, a smaller triangle nose, a row of teeth. Everyone recognises it, and it is the most forgiving face to draw: a triangle is three straight lines and none has to be smooth.
Want it mean instead of friendly? Tilt the top point of each eye inward toward the nose. That reads as a scowl with no eyebrows drawn. For a toothier grin, keep the mouth wide and shallow, fill it with narrow pointed Vs rather than three fat ones, and ink the gaps black. Leave a couple of teeth out - a full set looks like a comb.
- Friendly: level eyes, wide mouth curving up at the corners, three or four big teeth.
- Mean: eyes tilted inward, narrow mouth, a row of small sharp teeth.
- Goofy: one eye bigger than the other, a single square tooth.
Shading that sits it on a surface
An outline on white paper floats. Two marks fix that. Hatch a band of shadow down the outer rib on the side away from your light, and carry some under the stem. Then put an oval of shadow on the ground, wider than tall, touching the base on that same side.
The cut-outs do the rest. Lit, the eyes, nose and mouth go yellow and the shading around them stays heavy, so the contrast sells the glow. Unlit, fill the cut-outs solid black and keep the shading light.
Use the drawing as a carving template
The face you just drew is a stencil. Redraw it at the size of the pumpkin on your porch, tape the paper to the front, and poke through the outlines with a pushpin every quarter inch. Peel the paper off and you have a dotted map to cut along. Straight-sided triangles also happen to be what a kitchen knife cuts cleanly.
That same face transfers onto the real thing over in carving a pumpkin, or onto one you paint instead of cutting. For the rest of the season, a bat is two swept wings off a small body, a ghost is one flowing outline, and a skull is a sphere with a jaw box under it. New to drawing? How to draw covers pencil grades and light-line sketching.
