How to draw a Halloween pumpkin

Six frames, one carved pumpkin. The middle rib with its face comes first, and the curling tendril last.

A carved pumpkin is the drawing most people want at the end of October and the one that goes wrong in a predictable way: it comes out as a circle with three holes in it. What makes a jack-o’-lantern read as a pumpkin rather than as a ball is that it is built from RIBS — separate vertical segments, each bulging out from the one behind — and this sheet takes one drawing of a carved pumpkin and builds it a rib at a time over six frames.

Frame one is the CENTRE RIB with the face already carved into it: two triangular eyes, a triangular nose between and below them, and the top edge of the mouth. Everything on this sheet hangs off that one shape. It is not a circle — it is a tall rounded segment, wider in the middle than at the top and bottom, and its edges are the two lines that everything else is drawn against.

The face is carved into the centre rib and not onto the whole pumpkin, which is the single most useful thing this sheet shows. Beginners draw the pumpkin first and then put a face on top of it, and the face ends up floating flat on a curved object. Here the eyes, the nose and the mouth belong to the middle segment from the very first frame, so they sit where they belong from the start.

Frame two adds the two OUTER ribs, one on each side, and these are the shapes that turn the segment into a pumpkin. Each is a crescent: much narrower than the centre rib, curving from the top of the pumpkin to the bottom, and touching the centre rib along its whole length rather than overlapping it. Two ribs of the same width as the middle would give you three sausages; the narrowing is what makes them read as the sides of something round.

The mouth is completed in frame three, along with a fourth rib between the centre and the right. A carved mouth is a wide grin with square teeth left standing in it, and the teeth are the part worth slowing down for: they are gaps in the cut, not shapes added to it, and drawing them as separate squares sitting in the mouth is what makes a pumpkin look like it has dentures.

Frame four brings the STALK and the LEAF at the top and the chin below the mouth. A pumpkin stalk is short, thick and slightly bent, not a straight stick, and it is ribbed along its length. The leaf beside it is broad with a notched edge.

Frame five adds the leaf’s veins and brings the three carved holes up to their full weight. Like the highlight on the heart sheet, the eyes and the nose appear twice on this sheet — outlined in frame one and finished in frame five — because of how the frames are built. It is worth knowing so that a thin first pass does not look like a mistake.

The last frame is the CURLING TENDRIL that springs from beside the stalk, plus the small ellipse that caps the stalk itself. The tendril is the detail most people leave off and the one that most improves the drawing: a single line that spirals in on itself, drawn loosely rather than as a neat coil. It is also the only curve in the whole picture that is not part of something solid, which is why the drawing looks stiff without it.

The six frames run from the largest closed shape to the smallest, biggest rib first and the tendril last. It is not a claim about how anyone should draw a pumpkin, and starting with the outer silhouette is the way most people would do it. What the rib-first order shows is that the face and the middle segment are one shape, which is the part a drawing usually gets wrong.

The download is one A4 page with all six frames on it, plain black outline on white and nothing shaded, so it prints on any printer and photocopies cleanly for a class. Coloured in, the ribs take slightly different oranges very well, and the carved holes are the one place a pumpkin drawing can take a flat black.

Published 2 September 2026Updated 2 September 2026718 words