2.3.11

Astronomatryoshkas


My girlfriend is majoring in Astronomy, so for her birthday I made some astronomer matryoshkas. She is really awesome so I tried to make a gift as awesome as she is. I had planned them out for months and it was great to finally be able to give them to her and see the look on her face as she opened each one. These were done with acrylic on wood (I am really rusty at painting and acrylics are maybe my least favorite medium :/), and I kind of cheated and used a brush pen for the black lines, since I couldn't really pull off the detail in paint. The downside is that the ink from the pens comes off the paint when you handle them so I have to put a varnish on them. Hopefully, if you know anything about famous astronomers, you can guess who they are (without cheating!).







-EDIT-

"Dear Nate,
These are backwards.
-The Internet"

Well, yes, I suppose so. But for whatever reason, since childhood I've always thought of each nesting doll as giving birth to the next tiny pregnant woman. I think maybe a short on Sesame Street is responsible... Anyway, thats the impetus of the cockup.

27 comments:

Jeff Hebert said...

Let's see, I am going to make my guesses from top to bottom (with no cheating!):

Copernicus
Galileo
Newton
Sagan
Hawking

How'd I do?! And they look fantastic, by the way.

Unknown said...

Have you played Stacking? Play Stacking.

elmo iscariot said...

I'm with Jeff. I wasn't sure about Sagan until I realized that disk was the Voyager record.

It's too bad you didn't have room for Tycho Brahe; he could have been holding his nose. ;)

jennis233 said...

Wow these are so awesome :D!

Lisa said...

Awesome!!

Anonymous said...

"If I have seen further it is by standing inside the intestines of Giants" (Isaac Newton)

EK said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tony said...

these are really great, man. Absolutely brilliant.

-T

--K. said...

Just saw these on Boing Boing. Fantastic! (And I always loved that Sesame Street short.)

Unknown said...

I knew Sagan the moment i saw his turtleneck/jacket combo.

Anonymous said...

Awesome. When I first saw the pictures on BoingBoing I thought the Sagan doll was actually Jack Horkheimer: The Star Hustler.

Ziggy...maybe said...

These are awesome! Though I am wondering what the thought process for the selection of each doll. I dont mean that as criticism. They were all great men who were ground breakers in their field. I'm just wondering why, for example, Copernicus over Brache/Kepler, or Ptolemy? Or Sagan over Hubble? I'm not suggesting you should have done these over the ones you made. Each of them made huge contributions. Like I said, just wondering about your thought process.

Z.snafu

JohnAspinall said...

Personal attention + appropriate theme + great execution = awesomely awesome.

Stuart McMillen said...

These are excellent. Well done. I particularly like Carl Sagan's thumbs up!

I also suspect that some of these were selected because of their recognisability. e.g. Stephen Hawking is more visually distinctive than Ptolemy.

Anonymous said...

Awesome, want to make these available for sale? I would certainly buy.

Anonymous said...

I would probably buy them too for my hubby who is into astronomy. And as a woman, I want to say how fab your gift was. No doubt your girlfriend was thrilled (lots and lots).

Davso said...

Really great work. Didn´t recognized Sagan at first sight. Awesome!!!

C said...

did you carve the wooden dolls? if not, where can you buy blank matryoshkas?

La Société des Monstres Célèbres said...

These make us so happy, and are super cute and funny! What a fun project. Your girlfriend must be psyched!

Rahul Rao said...

These are so wonderful. You should plan on making more and selling them. :)

Anonymous said...

I'd like them more if they were REAL asronomers like Russell Grant and Paul Daniels, and not some guys from Star Trek.

Jeff Hebert said...

I can certainly see why that last commenter was unwilling to put a name to it. Wow.

Tim Ridge said...

How soon until you market these for all us astronomy geeks out there?

Reiko Fardreamer said...

Brilliant!

Absolutely brilliant :)

Zac and Sasha Cerrato said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Zac and Sasha Cerrato said...

I would love to commission another set of these! ...give me a shout if you're interested: Cerrato@me.com

Anonymous said...

I just found you by searching "nestling dolls planets."
Ever thought of making round nestling dolls of the planets, in relative sizes?