Some time in the early part of last year, Disney released a small papercraft R2D2. After printing out a few in the office, I printed out a gigantic one that was life size. Once that one had been assembled I had decided that it was so cool that I was going to adapt the design and at Christmas someone was going to get a present wrapped like R2D2.

In order to save time I simplified the shape of R2D2, making the body and legs simple rectangular boxes. I had to make my own boxes to get the scale right. I measured one of the little papercraft models and then started cutting up cardboard and taping it together into boxes.

After getting all the boxes assembled I loaded the original papercraft PDF into Illustrator and set about cleaning it up so that I could print it out on my large format DesignJet. I had to delete a lot of stuff and remove a few details to get the artwork to fit my boxes, but it's still very recognizable.

To attach the legs I inserted some 2x4s in each leg then drove screws from inside the body. The feet were attached by driving a screw in from the bottom. I turned the top of R2D2 into a lid that could be easily opened. I was pretty sure no-one was going to want to tear it open and it also made it easy for me to stick the gift inside. I didn't even tape the lid shut, it was secure enough when the flap was tucked in.

The R2D2 wrapping came out great. It was definitely a big step up from the other unusual shaped presents!