Dripping-Paint Cartoon Astronaut — Planetarium Forecourt, Leiden

A planetarium wanted a figure for the forecourt that would still work for the six-year-olds who arrive in the morning and the adults who leave at eleven at night, which is a longer day than one idea usually covers.

The one joke, told properly

The astronaut is finished to look as though the paint is still running: a saturated ground with long vertical drips of a contrasting colour frozen mid-run down the body and the legs, each one finishing in a rounded bead. Nobody commissions a still-wet sculpture by accident, so everything else about the piece is played completely straight. It is one joke told well rather than four jokes told quickly, and the difference shows up in the fact that the piece also works for somebody who never notices the joke at all.

Drips are a lighting problem

A drip only reads as a drip if it stands proud of the surface. Each one was built as a raised ridge about 4 mm high with a bead at the lower end and then painted in the same pass as the ground, so that the film runs unbroken over the edge. Painted flat, they vanished completely beyond about four metres, which is a distance this forecourt is never viewed from.

By day and by night

The forecourt is floodlit, and a raised drip under floodlight throws a hard shadow that roughly doubles its apparent depth. The bead at the end of each drip is 9 mm, which is the smallest size that still casts a readable shadow from the far side of the forecourt at night.

On the forecourt

It stands at 2.4 m beside the doors rather than in front of them, so arriving visitors pass it on the way in and leave past its back, which carries drips running the other way. The planetarium’s note about what the children do with it is in the panel above.