How The Book Was Made

What you see in AstroNuts was collaged from really really old art and brand new drawings by Steven Weinberg. But what does that mean?

Art like the image above is actually a mixture of a TON of art from a lot of places. In AstroNuts we sourced the art mainly from The Smithsonian in Washington, DC and The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

A few years back museums all over the world decided they wanted to share their art with everyone. Now a growing few offer all or their entire collection online as high quality scans anyone can use with ZERO copyright restrictions. (The Smithsonian and The Rijksmuseum have simple and easy to use databases.)

We have been thrilled to collaborate with them and even made a mini AstroNuts adventure with the Smithsonian. This FREE downloadable booklet walks you through how to collage with the Smithsonian art!

But how do we make this collage? Well, This engraving below is from the Rijksmusem. Does anything in it look familiar? (Hint: look at the top of this page.)

When you look at the AstroNuts, you’re really looking at a bunch of paintings, photographs, and engravings and from a long time ago all chopped up, recolored, put together and drawn all over.

AlphaWolf comes from this engraving print titled Natuurlijke geschiedenis by an unknown artist. (We added AlphaWolf for your AstroConvenience.)

Here’s a step-by-step animation showing exactly how AlphaWolf is made.

Plant Planet resident Major Giant Venus Fly Trap was made from this print: Polyptoton de Flore (The Variance of Flowers) by Johann Theodor de Bry.

Even stuff like chalkboards were collaged from old art. This is one of Steven’s favorite pieces in the Rijksmuseum collection: The Vision of St. Eustace Albrecht Dürer

And sometimes whole epic oil painting masterpieces were used as backgrounds. In AstroNuts Mission Three: THE PERFECT PLANT that happens a lot. Here’s a Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt… plus some AstroNuts!

You can find all the art we collaged from the Rijksmuseum for book one here, book two here, and book three here. (Though most of book three does come from the Smithsonian.)

If you want to make your own AstroNuts please check out the Make Your Own Art section. We have pdfs for download there so you can collage your own!

You can also see another version of this explanation made by Steven on the arts website Hyperallergic here.