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A professional pumpkin carver who creates portraits of figures such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin has gone viral, earning up to £20,000 a year from his spooky side hustle.
42-year-old Jamie Jones from Capenhurst in Chester, discovered his interest in the craft at the age of 30. He refined his technique by practising on 30 to 40 pumpkins every year “until his fingers bled”.
In addition to his full-time career as an events and media sales manager, he builds three-dimensional designs by shaving fine layers from the pumpkin’s surface instead of cutting traditional shapes through it.
Following a £300 win at the York Maze pumpkin carving contest in 2019, he set up his business, Pumpkin Freak, in 2020, eventually working with clients including Pets at Home and Warner Bros.
His designs have also featured horror icons such as Pennywise, Freddy Krueger and the Terrifier, as well as notorious figures including Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein.
His business typically turns over between £10,000 and £20,000 a year, with each commission taking six to 20 hours to complete.
However, this year, he decided to take on no paid work so he could “have fun” with his designs, carving characters including Michael Myers from Halloween and Uncle Fester from The Addams Family, as well as prominent political figures he finds to be “terrifying”.
Jamie, who is married to Gemma, 40, a nurse, and is a father of two to Alice, 10, and Penny, eight, told PA Real Life: “I wanted to practise carving a face and, quite frankly, I found them both – Putin and Trump – terrifying people so I thought: ‘I’m going to stick them on a pumpkin’.”
Jamie discovered his passion for pumpkin carving at the age of 30, in 2013, after realising how “creative you can be” with the designs while carving pumpkins for a family Halloween party.
His designs have become increasingly intricate over the years, and Jamie’s technique involves starting with a stencil of an image or a drawing before using lino cutters and chisels of different sizes to carve varying depths into the pumpkin.
To practise his skills, Jamie would carve 30 to 40 pumpkins each year, “until his fingers bled”.
In 2018, a friend asked him to carve a pumpkin featuring his company’s logo for £50, sparking the idea of turning his passion into a business.
The following year, Jamie began selling pumpkins to locals on Facebook for around £50 each, creating personalised carvings of their pets.
That same year, he won a pumpkin carving competition at York Maze with a design of Beetlejuice, taking home a £300 prize.
He used the money to launch his business, Pumpkin Freak, in 2020.
Within its first year, he had worked with brands including Warner Bros and Pets at Home, carving pumpkins featuring their logos for events and social media campaigns.
Jamie also films videos of his carvings for brands to use on social media, meaning he sometimes does not even need to send them the physical pumpkin.
Many of his videos on social media have gone viral – such as his Ozzy Osbourne pumpkin clip gaining more than 1.5 million views on Facebook.
In previous years, he has made up to £20,000 from commissions and even hired a team of four carvers he met through a Facebook group.
In 2024, he first carved political figures including Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, alongside horror characters such as Pennywise.
However, he was “not happy” with his Trump design and felt he could improve, prompting him to focus on creating more portraits in 2025.
His designs that year included serial killer Ed Gein, Aunt Gladys from the 2025 film Weapons, Frankenstein’s monster, Ozzy Osbourne and Barbara from the 1968 film Night Of The Living Dead.
He also received commissions to create pumpkins featuring a haunted supermarket for Morrisons, Greek vases for the Hercules musical and the logo of Stranger Things: The First Shadow stage show.
This year, however, Jamie decided not to take on any commissions, sacrificing his income to focus on his own designs because he was “sick of stencilling logos”.
He has also experimented with artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up his creative process.
He explained: “It’s been a game changer for me this year – it’s allowed me to make stencils a lot quicker than Photoshop – and with much more precision.
“I’m now able to use AI and manipulate images, changing face expressions, smooth textures, and more importantly change the lighting on a subject.
“I’ve trained my image processing AI to tackle different parts of an image in different ways – skin texture, hair, clothes and eyes all get treated differently.”
Jamie is not concerned about AI’s impact on the creative industry, believing those who “figure out how to use it creatively” will see “huge benefits”.
He added: “It’s simply another tool, automates time-consuming tasks, and has given me more time to be creative.”
Freed from commissions, Jamie has “had fun” experimenting with his designs throughout the year, starting with a zombie carving that took 12 hours to complete.
He has since carved Michael Myers from Halloween and Uncle Fester from The Addams Family, as well as Jack and Wendy Torrance from the 1980 film The Shining.
He explained of The Shining carving: “This took around 14 hours, and is a good example of where I’ve used AI to make the stencil.
“In the film his face is well lit from the front, I used AI to re-light the subject, giving much more contrast between light and shade, allowing me to more easily pick out the highlights across the face.”
Jamie considers his carving of Hannibal Lecter, which took 12 and a half hours, one of his “best carves of the year”.
He has also spent 14 and a half hours attempting another portrait of President Trump.
“I’ve tried and failed with this fruit cake before,” he said.
“I carved Trump a couple of years ago, and it was a total failure – carving an accurate likeness is hard.
“This sometimes happens and I always feel like I need to revisit certain people. Trump has been at the top of that list for a while. His hair is a nightmare to carve.
“I’m still not happy but it’s miles better than my first attempt.”
Jamie displays his finished pumpkins on his front lawn, washing them with bleach and water to help them last as long as possible.
Around Halloween, “a lot” of locals drive past his house to admire his creations, and he even judges the local pumpkin carving competition.
His children also get “stuck in” with the carving, with Jamie letting his two daughters “loose” with his tools.
He added: “My eldest gets really into it, and really concentrates when she’s doing the carving – I think she’s definitely a budding professional pumpkin carver!
“Both my daughters are very keen to get carving!”
For more information about Jamie’s work, visit pumpkinfreak.co.uk and youtube.com/pumpkinfreak.
