Star Wars Pumpkin Watch 2010 kicks off with a great piece on the NPR All Tech Considered blog. NPR's Andy Carvin spoke with Noel Dickover about his R2-D2 jack-o-lantern, which he says took about 10 or 11 hours to make and weighed in at 40 pounds.
In the story, Dickover explains how he created an accurate depiction of R2 on his pumpkin:
The other issue is whether the pumpkin has a smooth surface or whether it has a "grooved" surface. Grooved lines on R2-D2 obviously wouldn't work. Finally, for R2-D2, because I didn't have a pattern, I needed to have pictures of anatomically accurate R2-D2 pictures. I found these both with the Weta Sideshow R2-D2 sculpture and with some videos of fully functional R2-D2 units from the R2-D2 Maker's group. Then its a matter of taking the "real" R2-D2 and transposing it to the pumpkin you have.
If you like the R2-D2 pumpkin, be sure to check out Dickover's Death Star pumpkin as well! We're using it for the Halloween 2010 series image here on TFN.