Make a Steampunk Pumpkin. a SteamPunkin.

The pun was too good to pass up.  I was going to do a painting of something like this, but with Halloween around the corner I thought I'd take a shot at the real thing.  It was pretty easy and only took a couple hours and a few bucks.  Endless possibilities here if you want to do something a little different this year.  
Happy Halloween!

Step 1: Get Yourself a Pumpkin.

Ugly is good.  In fact, I bet that the uglier the pumpkin, the cooler the result.  
I hollowed mine out, thinking that I was still going to light it jack-o-lantern style,  but in hindsight I should have left it whole.

Step 2: Sketch Out Some Ideas.

get those creative juices flowin.

Step 3: Gather / Make Your Materials

Raid your junk drawer.  After the finishing paint even a straw can look like a cool piece of brass or copper tubing.  Remember that once this thing rots you're probably going to wind up chuckin your punkin in the trash, so you might not want to invest too much in materials.  Sculpy works wonders for making some quick textured pieces.  In case you're wondering about the eyes, I had a couple Mountain Lion taxidermy eyes laying around. I'll be sure to salvage those.  You can order really great glass eyes for a few bucks online if you're so inclined.
I decided just to make a whole bunch of stuff, without really knowing what all I'd use.

Step 4: Paint Your Materials

I just hit everything with a quick coat of back spray paint.  Quick and easy.  Note that its probably best to do this before assembling everything together.

Step 5: Get Ready for Assembly

I thought that I'd wind up using superglue to hold most things together, but found that sheet metal screws and wood screws both worked really well to fix things down.  If you have cats this is where they have to get all up in your business.  I just started to embed, glue, screw and punch into the pumpkin to get everything in place.  It happens pretty fast.

Step 6: And Now You Have...

A creepy jet black pumpkin with creepy eyes.  all you need to do now is get out some copper or bronze colored paint and star dry bushing.  That's when things start coming together.

Step 7: All Done.

In case you're wondering about some of the items used.

The weird goggle things:  egg carton with wires and stuff made from Sculpy.
Gears:  I found those at a craft store in the jewelry section.  I just shoved them into the pumpkin flesh like ninja stars.
Mouth:  corrugated card board.
Screws:  Some are real, some are Sculpy.
Monocle: a little glass locket, also from the craft store.  the chain and almost everything else is made from Sculpy... again.

Hope to see some others riff on this idea and post their results!

Paul