Meet “Farmer Mike” Valladao. He’s also known as the “Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers.” He wears orange overalls and a straw hat. 

Normally, he works as a computer systems engineer. But he goes into carving mode in autumn. 

Mr. Valladao chisels whimsical faces and comical creatures into big pumpkins. He’s done it for more than four decades. He’s sculpted hundreds of gourds. Seaside landscapes. Dragons. Yoda. Charlie Brown. He’s carved them all, and more.

Who trained Mr. Valladao? No one. He taught himself. Where does he get ideas? From art museums. Or just from walking down the street and seeing the people God made.

“Sometimes I’ll look at somebody and I’ll think, oh, I like the teeth or I like ears or the way the nostrils flare,” he says.

 This year, Mr. Valladao celebrated 40 years of work at the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival in California. (The festival is known for its giant pumpkin weigh-off.) He works on stage so people can watch.

Here’s how Farmer Mike got started with pumpkins. He began growing big pumpkins at home in the 1980s. He wondered: What should he do with the massive gourds? He pulled out a knife. He started carving faces.

“I tend to look at it as building something the same way I would build a piece of hardware, one layer at a time,” he says. 

In 1986, festival organizers saw a photo of his pumpkins. They invited him to showcase his carving skills in Half Moon Bay. Since then, other cities have sent him invitations too.

The ideal canvas? Atlantic pumpkins weighing from 100 to 1,000 pounds. These have thick skins. Mr. Valladao can cut in facial features, shallow or deep. 

“It’s really about the illusion of depth,” he says. “I can make it so that it’s three-dimensional, such that the eyes are inset and the nose sticks out.”

If you carved such masterpieces, would you name them? Mr. Valladao doesn’t—because the pumpkins don’t last long. 

But there are always more pumpkins to be carved.