Vancouver man's pumpkin portraits pay tribute to the Queen

In a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II, a Vancouver man has carved three pumpkin portraits of the late monarch, and is making the designs available for free online.

Jeremy Burghall has been using the gourds as his canvass since he was 10, practicing and honing his craft during the spooky season each year for the past three decades.

"I prefer to use actual pumpkins. There's a lot of people out there that do foam pumpkins, which actually allows you to do even more detailed work, but I prefer to stick to the real deal," he told CTV News.

His inspiration came from the closing credits of the TV show Roseanne, where the cast members' realistic likenesses were carved into jack-o-lanterns.

"It really captivated me and I thought, 'I want to try to see if I can do that,'" he said.

"I tried and it worked and I just kept going at it year after year, getting more and more skilled at it."

In recent years, he's focused his carvings on celebrities or recognizable figures who have passed away. This year, after the death of the Queen, he decided to create multiple portraits in her memory. Each portrait, he said, took roughly five hours to carve.

"I was trying to see if I could capture her different ages. It's a little bit tricky because some photos work better than others," he explained.

This photo submitted by Jeremy Burghall shows three pumpkin portraits of Queen Elizabeth II that he carved for Halloween in 2022.

While the chance to visit a display and see his work at a rented venue in Burnaby has passed, Burghall is making the stencils available at no cost through his website for anyone who wants to try to create one of their own. Other designs are available for $5 each, and feature real-life figures such as Betty White, Bernie Sanders and Beyonce, as well as fictional characters from TV shows like The X-Files and Star Trek.