Gamorrean Guard Jack-O’-Lantern (Gamm-O’-Lantern?) by Me

For the past several years, I’ve tried carving Jabba’s Palace-themed pumpkins around Halloween. I started out using a rotary tool (dremel) to carve Jabba the Hutt and Salacious Crumb pumpkins, but I didn’t really like using the dremel much. It’s harder to use than I would have expected and didn’t yield as good results as I had hoped. On the bright side, it does fill the room with the smell of pumpkin pie, due to the friction actually cooking some of the pumpkin.

Then I moved on to the sculpted style, where you scrape off the outer rind and actually sculpt the pumpkin rather than just carving into its surface. This technique is not easy and is time consuming, but I find it pretty rewarding and I think I’m getting better at it. I started out last year with Bib Fortuna (although you probably wouldn’t know who he is just to look at him) and then moved on to Jabba the Hutt and the Rancor Monster.

This time I decided to tackle a Gamorrean Guard. This is not an easy character to do, since the piggy face of a Gamorrean is quite long, necessitating a pumpkin with a very thick rind. Luckily, I found one that worked pretty well. I cut a trap door in the back in order to clean out the guts and used some of the rind from the trap door to fashion the horns that stick out of his head. Using sections of untouched rind as his helmet seemed like a no-brainer. He looked surprisingly cool when lit up, albeit a bit demonic… [EDIT: I’ve been entering my pumpkins each year into Sideshow Collectibles’ pumpkin carving contest, and I finally won runner up with this one! I’m not sure what my prize is, but it’s nice to get a little validation.]