Sculpting Moon Craters: Tsiolkovskiy Crater

With all the end-of-year busyness last year, I never got around to posting about an artwork I finished back around December. (Then I decided it wasn't quite finished and did a little more work on it a few weeks ago, so go figure.) After my first foray into more three-dimensional sculpture back in 2019, I wanted to try something in a similar vein.

Back around December 2019 I was inspired by the crater Tsiolkovskiy (located on the far side of the Moon) to sculpt a crater out of clay and paint it. While much of the Moon's near side is covered with darker lava (as you can see by looking when the Moon is mostly full), most of the Moon's far side is lacking this, instead being the same color as the lighter areas of the near side (the “lunar highlands”). Tsiolkovskiy crater, named for Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy, one of the founding fathers of rocketry (with an important equation named after him too) is one of the rare exceptions, a crater with a floor flooded with dark lava. It's quite a large crater, too, with a diameter of some 300 km/185 miles; like many large craters it has a central “rebound” peak which towers an imposing 3200 m/10,500 ft above the smooth lava plains around it, around the height of Haleakalā above sea level.

Anyway, inspired by this fairly unique crater, I picked up a circular piece of artist's board about a year ago, painted it with an undercoat, and then left it on my desk for nine months during the lockdowns last year. When I was finally able to get back in to Swinburne and retrieve it, I picked up some modeling clay and started sculpting the crater's form, which proved to be quite fun!

The underlying topography of Tsiolkovskiy crater.

After letting the clay dry I painted it all a nice light gray, then got to the step which had originally inspired me: pouring a dark gray ‘lava’ into the crater to fill in the central plains. The paint turned out to be a little more viscous than I'd been imagining (even though it's called “self-leveling gel” for this sort of work!), but it worked out in the end.

With the dark lava plains filled in. North is roughly up in all of these photos, by the way.

I ended up painting it a little more gray after a few weeks—I'd been trying to give it a little tinge of color originally, but I felt it just wasn't working so I went back to a more neutral shade in the end.

“Tsiolkonskiy Crater,” 30 cm in diameter, modeling clay and acrylic.

Overall it's been a really interesting and fun project, and I might do more pieces in this vein in the future. It'd be cool to do a sculpture of Olympus Mons, for instance, or other famous craters, mountains, or valleys in the solar system. Given my love of experimenting with 3D effects on canvas, I suppose sculpture is simply a natural extension of that. With finishing my PhD on the horizon and the associated job-hunting and possibly-moving I don't know when I'll be able to make another one of these, but hopefully it won't be too long. A hui hou!