Halloween Pumkin Carvings

Here are my pumpkin carvings for this year. The patterns were found in Pumpkin Masters pumpkin carving books and on various websites like zombiepumpkins.com. I just wanted to challenge myself a little and have some fun. Enjoy!

Pumpkin Totem Pole - Lit

Pumpkin Totem Pole - Unlit

If you are looking for a different way to display your carvings, the pumpkin totem pole is a fun way. These are artificial pumpkins stacked with a dowel rod attached to a base in the center for support. I use leaf garland to cover the spaces between pumpkins and to add some more decoration. The nice part about the artificial pumpkins is that I can reuse them again next year!

Cheshire Cat - with color changing light

I found these great color changing LED lights for pumpkins at the craft store. They add a lot of fun to the carvings!

Cheshire Cat - with color changing light

Scooby-Doo - with color changing light

Scooby probably turned out as one of the best. He was my favorite cartoon character when I was a kid, this is a little nod to him.

Scooby-Doo - with color changing light

Lion - with color changing light

This was originally a tattoo design that I found online at tattooique.com under tribal tattoos. I altered a little to make it suitable for pumpkin carving. Very intricate and challenging!

Lion - with color changing light

Hope you enjoyed them! Happy Halloween!

Art Facebook Site Live and New Art Updates!

 I have new Art Facebook Page live now, visit and Like!  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kelly-Nixon-Art/284621634972724

Time for another art update! Here are some of my ceramics and jewelry work.

Cylinder Containers

This is a set of nesting cylinder containers. I used hammering techniques to make a bubble-like design on the sides.

Shell Ring

Copper and brass ring with silver band. The top of the ring is made with two seashells that are striped with brass and copper. The shells encase a copper pearl. The inner band is made with silver.

This ring is so big it could probably be used like brass knuckles!

Silent Sentinel

 Copper silhouette of a cheetah with liver of sulfur for color variation. This piece is made with two sheets of copper that were hammered to get different textures and later space-riveted together to create depth. The original piece is 1in x 2in.

Flaming Leap

 Copper broach with Liver of Sulfer and Blue Patina used for color variations. This piece was space riveted, so there is a little bit of space between each layer, which creates a more 3D effect.

Wary Perch

Hand-built ceramic vessel. The shape and colors were inspired by Greek urns and vessels. Decorated with an animal narrative: Two wolves are tracking a snow leopard through a rocky-mountain area. The leopard watches their approach from higher ground.

This piece is about 15in. tall and 28in. around at its widest point.
Now the only question is what to put in this beast?!

Worn Soul

 Hand-built ceramic cowboy boot. Stained for color variation. This piece was modeled from direct observation of a real boot down to the seam and rip details.

This piece is the actual size of an average cowboy boot, but much heaver!

Blue Tide

 Wheel-thrown ceramic bowl.

Fun glaze fact: A little white and black glaze + kiln firing = speckled blue. Go figure.

Red Tide

Wheel-thrown ceramic bowl. The coloring is the effect of white glaze mixing with the red during firing. It reminds me of waves washing in on the beach. I really love the surprise blends different glazes can give you from firing!

Rippling Mug

 Wheel-thrown ceramic mug with a hand-built handle. Decorated with a wavy design and nice mixing of white and black glazes to create blue.

Red Rimmed Onyx

 Wheel-thrown bowl. Black glaze with a red rim.

Burgundy Mug

 Wheel-thrown mug with hand-built handle. Colors are a great blend of red and white glazes.

Red Speckled Bowl

  Wavy-sided bowl made using wheel-throwing. Great speckling colors made using red and white glazes.

Twin Spouted Bowl

Double spouted bowl. Blue made with the blending of white and black glazes during firing. This bowl could easily be a sugar or spice dish. The spouts double for pouring contents or resting spoons.


That is all for now! More to follow soon. I will be adding some pumpkin carvings before Halloween, be looking for them!

Art Updates

Finally its time for some art updates!!!

Discovery of a Werewolf

This is a small comic piece done in pencil. A man walks in on a werewolf attack in progress. The question is what will he do next?

Futuristic House Design

 This is a small gouache painting. For those of you unfamiliar with it, gouache is like a thick opaque watercolor and it is great for giving vivid colors. This house was designed to fit in the void between two canyons and has a greenhouse area on the top for growing food, vents on the front of the base to capture wind energy for power and heat/cool the home, piping to gather ground water, and entrances on both canyon sides. Its kind of like a live in bridge.

Future Robot Design: Litter Collector

 This is another gouache painting. I was experimenting to get a few painterly effects, mainly in the background and on the animals. The story here was how robots might be used in the future. Here I interpreted them as caretakers of nature. They keep the forests clean and protect them. This robot is collecting trash.

The Fox Painter

 This was an illustration spread for a little comic I made. In the story, a boy gains the power to make his paintings come to life, after helping a magical fox get free of some rubble in a cavern.

Fox Painter Spot Illustration

 Here is a spot illustration for my Fox Painter comic. After spending the night cowering in a closet to get away from bad creatures, the boy emerges to find one of his paintings has changed positions and has marks of fighting on it. The painting had come to life and protected him from the creatures.

Bear/Frog Hybrid

 Here is a little Photoshop exercise I did during student teaching to demonstrate how to combine different animal photographs digitally. The real focus was to match colors and blend the images seamlessly. In this piece, I combined a bear, frog, turtle and some moss and rock textures to create this twisted little animal. I'm trying to think of what sound this guy would make.

Dream of Falling

 My interpretation of falling in a dream. Made in Photoshop by using blurred Christmas lights for the background and merging it with the photo of the figure.

Flashlight Blur

 Flashlight fun! Made by attaching colored gels to flashlights and moving them around. The camera has to be set to take a long exposure. The longer it takes the more trails you can make.

Flashlight Blur 2

That is all I have for now. I will be adding more art from jewelry, ceramics, and some logo designs I have been doing over the next few days. Check back for more updates soon!

New Update and Portfolio Website Live!

Finally a new update!

I have been busy with student teaching and building up what I need to do some freelance work over the last year, so please excuse the lack of posting. I will be adding in some new material that I have been working on in the next few days, so expect some regular updating.

For now, I will leave you with my brand new art portfolio site. kellynixonart.com just went live a few days ago! Go check it out! If you or anyone you know would like to have some illustration, design, or other type of artwork done, please get in touch with me at kellynixonart@gmail.com.

Enjoy for now, more to come soon!

Halloween Pumpkins

Its been a loooong time since my last update. I have been busy personally and with school for a while. I actually started teaching one-shot art classes at different grade levels and different elementary schools this semester, so most of my art has been pertaining to making demo models for my lessons.

This Halloween I decided to set aside some time and actually carve real pumpkins this year. It has been well over 8 years since I carved a pumpkin, so I was in the mood to try carving some interesting ones. I found a few ideas online and ran with them. I wound up carving them on Halloween weekend, the first was a pumpkin eating another pumpkin, the second was Puss n' Boots from Shrek, and the last one I tried to do more like a sculpture and I shaved away/sculpted parts of the pumpkin to make a bear. The last one didn't turn out that well and I don't really have a picture of it, but it was still fun to try something new.


Cannibal Pumpkin Unlit


Cannibal Pumpkin Lit


Puss from Shrek

*Sorry for the image quality, I had to use a cell phone to take the pics b/c my camera was dead. The pumpkins rotted too quick for me to get better pics, now they're deer food behind my fence :)

Box Portfolio

This is something I've been meaning to upload for a while, but I hadn't gotten around to photographing it until now. Last Spring I made a box portfolio that was designed to take with me on interviews, etc. and hold my art samples, business cards, postcards, and DVD portfolio. I based the design/structure after a japanese style bookbinding method that I learned in a class a while back.

It's made out of some thin sheets of wood for the top and bottom, the sides are pieces of plywood that I stacked and glued on top of each other. I lightly painted the plywood so the lines in it could show through and resemble pages. I made the cover by cutting out some windows with a drimmel and covering the wood with paper. The paper is actually only glued on the edges because it kept getting bubbles in it every time I tried to glue the whole thing down. I went through about 2 extra papers before I got it right. The windows are some plastic overhead projector paper. I added a ribbon in the book so the contents of the could be easily removed.

Overall, I'm really pleased with the way it turned out. There are a few little issues with it though. The inside could be bigger, I've had to trim down papers to make them fit. The only other thing is the hinge were the top opens. There isn't enough space between the spine and the cover part of the book, so the top can't be fully opened. I've been thinking about making a second one to go with my Art Education Portfolio that will be made so it won't have these issues. I'll definitely be hanging on to this one though, for my illustration portfolio. I learned a lot by making this box portfolio and actually used power tools on my own for the first time in the wood shop :D. It was challenging and a lot of fun to work though the problems I had while making this and now that I have a better idea of how to approach it I feel like I could make another one easily.

That's all for now! Enjoy!

Isometric Perspective

I did another tryptic presentation for one of my classes. This time it had to focus on an artistic element or concept. The one I chose was isometric perspective. It is a form of parallel perspective that has no vanishing points and all of the axes are equally foreshortened. Also in this form of perspective, the scale of an object doesn't change, so an object would appear the same size anywhere in the picture instead of getting smaller with depth. Since there are no vanishing points there is no optical distortion. Isometric perspective is commonly used in traditional Asian art (it was started by ancient Chinese scroll painters), in technical/engineering drawings, and in some video games. I picked images from Hiroshige and M. C. Escher to illustrate the concept.



That's it for now.