‘Moon Maintenance’ has to be one of my favourite art prints I made so far. I even went to get it printed so I can have it displayed in the living room.
The idea behind this poster started with a half-funny thought. I was trying to come up with space-related poster ideas that involve astronauts. Amongst all the possibilities, compositions, themes and concepts this idea came to me: how bizarre/funny would be the idea of an astronaut trying to get to the Moon on a ladder? Now that I wrote this down it doesn’t seem too funny nor fascinating I guess, but in that moment I thought that this direction might be worthy of exploring.
I started to gather stock images and played around with them to see how I can make this concept visually appealing. As I was working, I started to ellaborate on the idea even more: why would the astronaut try to approach the Moon? I felt like the story wasn’t complete and that was reflected in the art work too: it was lacking in a way.
I thought that perhaps the astronaut could be holding a bouquet and trying to give it to the Moon. I liked the romantic sentiment of this direction, but I didn’t think that it could work visually. Unless the image is a closeup of the astronaut and his hand, the flower would get lost in the big picture. But then if it’s so zoomed in on the flower, the Moon gets lost.
So I had to bin the idea of the peculiar romance and somehow ended up putting a paint brush in his hand. I felt really excited about that direction but again, the brush was too small so I switched it to a paint roller instead. I did a lot of editing, because I had to stitch together the astronaut’s body from many different photos in order to achieve this angle and this posture. Then hours and hours of further editing later the art work was complete. I have to say, I’m very happy with it.
This poster is available for purchase here. Plenty of sizes and frames to choose from!
art from scratch 