Local Pumpkin Carver to Appear on Outrageous Pumpkins All Stars

T his Sunday, September 29, Fairfield-based pumpkin carver William E. Wilson, owner of Wicked Designz Carvings , will appear on the fifth season of Outrageous Pumpkins on Food Network. This season, called Outrageous Pumpkins All Stars , sees 14 of the best carvers in the nation competing for $50,000.

“I do stuff for the Cincinnati Zoo, but very rarely does someone give you 15 to 20 pumpkins and say, ‘Create a scene of this,’” says Wilson, who filmed the episode last November at a farm in Virginia owned by Ohio State alum. “The people on the show are legends in their own right.”

This, of course, isn’t Wilson’s first brush with TV. He appeared on the second season of Outrageous Pumpkins , another Food Network show called Halloween Wars , and a Disney snow carving show called Best in Snow . Back in February, he competed at the World Ice Art Championships in Fairbanks, Alaska, in which his team placed fifth in the world. Next month, October 11-13, he’ll host Hamilton’s Operation Pumpkin , an art festival in which he brings in different carvers to showcase their skills.

But how does one become a professional pumpkin carver? For Wilson, it wasn’t something he set out to do. He studied culinary arts at Scarlet Oaks. There, he recalls that he fell in love with garde-manger—managing cold foods and their presentation—and he became an executive chef at P&G Health and Beauty through Aramark. About 10 years ago, he got into pumpkin carving through his neighbor Jon Micheals, a professional carver.

“Pumpkin carving is kind of like garde-manger,” says Wilson, who now runs a restoration company in addition to his pumpkin-carving business. “I wanted some type of creative outlet in my life, and carving fed that need.”

He started going to events with Michaels and eventually entered amateur contests.

“I think a lot of times we are fearful that our art is going to be judged and just being around a lot of people who are better than me,” he explains. “Jon taught me, ‘Hey man, do your own thing. Create and be fearless.’”

The first pumpkin Wilson carved was 100 pounds, and he carved a smiley face. Now, he and his kids like to sculpt zombies. He recently decorated a five-foot orangutan playing a guitar for the Cincinnati Zoo.

“If I’m going to spend a lot of time on something, I’m really going for it,” he says. “I want to make something that somebody’s never seen before. I like scenes and bigger scale stuff. I realized that I actually have sculpting skills and that there’s a methodology to it.”

On average, it takes him almost two hours to carve a pumpkin, which he does in his garage. The space is filled contains a rack he invented and clay tools.

“I joke that most women worry about their husbands going out gambling and drinking, but it would be four o’clock in the morning and my wife would have to come get me out of the garage,” he says. “She thought it was the weirdest thing, but now look at me. I run one of the largest festivals in Ohio.”

Every season he carves around 120 pumpkins, all of which he gets from Burwinkel Farms in Ross. He doesn’t pick just any pumpkin. He quips that a pumpkin will whisper to him if they want to be carved.

“We’re going for thickness,” he says. “When I pick a pumpkin up according to its size, if I pick a big one up and it’s light, then I know that it’s thin inside and it’s going to be really hard to create defined lines or dark lines in it if it’s only an inch thick. I’m looking for heaviness, the density and the brightness and color and no dense lines.”

Wilson noticed he’s one of a few people of color working as a professional carver— Oba Rhodes is another Black local food carver—but he says the medium is becoming more diverse, and more women have joined the ranks as carvers, too. For Operation Pumpkin, he keeps the field diverse in inviting people who have a variety of styles.

Though pumpkin carving isn’t a year-round art form, Wilson would like to teach classes on how to do it. “I love to wow people,” he says. “I love to give people something cool to look at, something that they take pictures of and they talk about all year.”

And in a world rife with AI, Wilson thinks pumpkin carving serves a vital purpose.

“I really want to see the comeback of this physical art of people actually competing and performing and getting out there and doing more because I think it’s a great joy and it adds so much to the Halloween spirit,” he says. “I’d love to see more people carving pumpkins. Ice and pumpkins, they’re ephemeral art. It’s only created to go away. But it’s the experience or the awe of seeing something like that in person that you actually want to touch.”

Outrageous Pumpkins All Stars airs at 10 p.m. EST on Food Network.

See some behind-the-scenes footage of how Wilson carved the “Spooky ’Nati” pumpkin for Cincinnati Magazine ’s October 2022 cover on our Instagram account .

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