New project starting

It´s been a while since my last post. It seems I´m not as digital as I thought.

I just came back from an inspiring holiday, which cleared my mind and opened room for new thoughts and ideas. So I just started a new project, leaving the unfinished ones on "standby".

In a tiny, enchanted shop a mobile of our solar system cought my eye. It was a big and impressive one with the Sun in the center and all nine Planets circling around it. It would look very good in our baby´s future child room and is a great object for learning with fun. It would have cost about 90 Euros. This is it, take a look. So I decided as a product designer and a skilled craftsman I´ll build one by myself.

I got all the material needed and spent about 85 Euros for it... what a good deal! The material could have been cheaper on the internet somewhere, but I like the idea of supporting the local art and craft shops.

On the other hand: both mobiles are not compareable. My mobile will have the moons circle around the planets (not all of them but the biggest ones) which means 20 Objects. The ready made mobile doesn´t show moons and for that reason it is built up of only half the number of objects.

For those of you, who have fun in exhuming their handicrafts skills, here is the material list:

• styrofoam globes (as Planets), 
• polyamide nylon thread (for invisible hanging), 
• wallpaper paste, newspaper and paint (for the planet surfaces), 
• or printed planet surfaces if you find them somewhere (I prefere to paint the planets), 
• stable and translucent paper or foil (for Saturns rings), 
• glass beads (for weight adjustment), 
• round wooden timbers and aluminium pipe (for the hangin construction); 

So, here we go!

First step was to cover the Planets and moons with paper maché to create a grounding of paper to paint on.

Haven´t done this for ages and it reminded me of handicraft, wood- and metalwork in happy school days... Though it took a while to cover all 20 globes it was great fun!

Now working on the painting. It is great what pictures of the different planets can be found on the web. For fabulous information about our solar system go to http://solarsystem.nasa.gov

I printed a coloured sample for every planet and every bigger moon and paint the globes manually. That will take a while.

By now finished:

Saturn, Venus, Uranus, Neptune;

I´ll keep you up to date with the progress!