With all the pressures of modern life and modern Halloween, carving the once-lowly pumpkin can be a daunting task.

Everywhere you look, some clever mom, a copy of Martha Stewart Living in hand, is carving out some burnt-orange masterpiece with finely cut stencils and half-exposed pumpkin flesh, an eerie glow emanating from the inside.

Somehow your old standby -- the dopey-faced jack-o'-lantern with crudely cut triangle eyes -- looks like a kid's stick figure drawing in a fine art gallery.

What's a craft-impaired/time-pressed parent to do?

Try a clever but simple design, says Karen Quinn, master of the 10-minute pumpkin.

Mrs. Quinn, a muralist and talented gardener who lives in McMurray, makes wonderfully whimsical pumpkins quickly without stencils or fancy tools.

She is a pumpkin pragmatist.

"Who wants to spend hours on something that is going to rot in four days?" she says, shrugging.

The artist, who does pumpkin-carving demonstrations at Simmons Farm in McMurray every fall, combs through the cartoon pages to look for exaggerated pumpkin features.

"They are little caricatures," she says as she puts the finishing touches on a pumpkin with hulking teeth and a swirling nose. She carves large expressive features with a small but very sharp kitchen knife after drawing them freehand on the pumpkin. She etches other features such as eyebrows on the surface with a clay carving tool. "I use an old-fashioned potato peeler for the eyes," Mrs. Quinn says. And she puts natural weeds and gourds on them for embellishment.

She loves misshapen pumpkins and sometimes turns the pumpkin on its side so that the stem becomes the nose.

People always plead with her to let them buy them, but she tells them they are so simple, they can do it themselves. (Of course, the woman who once carved 95 pumpkins for a corporate party slices pumpkins like they are cucumbers.)

Also in the less-is-more pumpkin camp is gonzo pumpkin carver Tom Nardone, author of the book "Extreme Pumpkins."

While Mrs. Quinn makes sweet pumpkins that could grace any front lawn, Mr. Nardone specializes in the kind of gory, gross-out pumpkins that would delight seventh-grade boys -- worm-infested pumpkins, bloody pumpkins wounded by gunshot, cannibalistic pumpkins, electrocuted pumpkins, a devil pumpkin with a red pepper in the mouth.

"One time someone complained the conjoined twin pumpkin gave them nightmares," he recalls.

Extreme pumpkins are a reaction to the Martha Stewart-ization of Halloween.

"The whole pumpkin thing was getting too lame," says Mr. Nardone, who lives in suburban Detroit. "Little painted pumpkin faces in the grocery store. It was too crafty and cute. It drove me nuts. Pumpkin carving should involve fire and knives."

Before you take umbrage and defend your lovingly carved designer pumpkin, keep in mind that this is a grown man who once scared neighborhood kids silly by jumping out of a metal trash can costume. Maturity is not his strong suit.

But, in fighting the perfectionism of the holiday, he is trying to bring back his childhood spirit of Halloween, when a neighbor boy would dress up as a gorilla and chase everyone in the neighborhood.

"When did boys stop carving pumpkins and moms start?" he writes on his Web site.

Instead of delicate cutting tools, he uses power tools that can demolish walls -- a jigsaw, a reciprocating saw -- for blasting through the skin of the vegetable.

"I want it to happen quickly," he says. "If it takes more than 20 minutes, I lose patience. I have three young kids. I have a toddler attention span."

There is no time in his day for pumpkin perfectionism. "There are football games to be watched. There are beers to be drunk."

The quick-and-macho approach to pumpkin carving has hit a nerve. He received 2 million visitors a year to his Web site, extremepumpkins.com, and his book has sold more than 22,000 copies.

"The ideas are funny. They look doable. It is the simplicity of it all. Nobody wants a book on how to construct an Eiffel Tower or dog house pumpkin."

Of course, gory fire-spewing pumpkins aren't everyone's idea of appropriate lawn ornaments.

Jim Price, owner of Cuttings, From Our House to Your Home, a floral and garden shop in Sewickley, sometimes carves classy pumpkins for his clients when he helps them decorate for parties.

The man who uses a lot of natural grasses and gourds might do a pumpkin with geometric patterns, some cut all the way through the skin and some partial cuts, to create a depth of light. And he carves whimsical pumpkins for kids' parties. For the spider pumpkin, he cuts out a circle for the face, digs out eyeballs with a screw and then cuts out long thin pairs of legs, some cut at a 45-degree angle.

But he also believes in quick and simple pumpkins, which he just eyeballs without drawing anything on the skin, and usually zips off in 10 or 15 minutes.

"Martha Stewart is fun and wonderful, but she has a staff of 40," he says. "Why should carving a pumpkin be intimidating? It should be fun."

Plus the man who gets paid for his decorating and floral ideas knows that there isn't a big market out there for spending hours on an intricate pumpkin.

"Who is going to pay me to carve a pumpkin?" he says with a laugh.

Watch a video on pumpkin carving