Every year since 1996, Innova Champion has put out an annual "Pumpkin" edition stamp for the Halloween season. Every year.. until this year, they've kept the theme consistent with the standard jack o' latern. After doing a first set of sketches and teasing a few skull designs toward the end of the thumbnails, Adrian Southern over at Innova mentioned the de los muertos theme and sugar skulls. So many possibilities and to give it a chance and see what comes out of the experiment.
I worked closely with Zeb Campbell and Adrian over the course of multiple revisions and options. The general consensus was the love of the bat wing basket. The challenge with this design was to incorporate the detail you see with common sugar skulls but keeping it simple enough where carving it could be believable.
Over the course of a few weeks, It led us down a few rough passes and we ended up Frankensteining parts of the final 4 to create one design. Here is 2016's Pumpkin Design. Thanks to Innova, Adrian and Zeb for having confidence in me to put something out against the grain. Hope you all like.
You can purchase them here: http://dgustore.com/index.php/specialty/holiday-discs.html