Unfortunately we didn’t take that many pictures of the first stages of building the models. It mainly consisted of covering balloons in paper maché so we would have customisable base for all two of our moons. The third moon would be made of metal and would be hollow, but I was still trying to find the tools to make these.
Originally our idea was to use the red wool we had bought to create squiggly shapes over the base sphere, and we were going to glue this down so the wool would be stiff and hold its shape. We started this process and quite quickly realised it didn’t work that well, and kept falling out of place as the glue wasn’t strong enough. We tried multiple different methods like completely dousing the wool in the glue and using super glue to glue parts of the wool together, but nothing worked so we decided to revisit it once what we had managed to do, had completely dried.
The earth planet we kept as the last one to do. We had bought clear balloons for this one, which were extremely hard to blow up ourselves, so we needed a pump. I was able to find one later which made the process so much easier.
Once the bases had dried, we could customise them. Here’s what we did
Air planet:
– added cotton stuffing all around it (I’m an avid sewer so luckily had some lying around from projects over the years)
– stuck different sized styrofoam balls on top to make it look lighter
Lava planet:
– checked the dried wool to see if it was usable; it wasn’t – it wouldn’t keep it’s shape and we would have had to use a lot of glue to further secure it to the base, and we only had half the sphere
– the base was quite soft, so I decided to sew the wool into the sphere; which was tedious but worked
– then we painted the base in a reddish-orange colour to look like lava
This meant that we only had the lava planet to finish off, and to make the metal and earth ones.
This process was very time-consuming, but also really fun. It took our mind off of other projects and we could just muck around a bit and see what happened. Yanis and I have had 2 meetings, each of about 3 hours, to make these models, and both times have put a movie on in the background to make the process feel less tiring.
