Dead Astronaut

This is my first time entering the Threadcakes contest. I have been decorating cakes as a hobby at home for just over a year now. As I have recently found myself unemployed I decided to celebrate my new found free time!! LOL! The cake is a basic yellow / vanilla cake with a lemon buttercream. This is all cake with no structures. I was worried about the top heavy weight and in the end the cake did squish down some as a result but I wanted this cake to be all cake. There isn't even a cake board between the layers. I baked 2 9 inch rounds and 3 6 inch rounds to build the cake cutting the 9 inch each in half and stacking them for his body and then cut smaller circles out of the 6 inch cakes to build the head. With the leveled tops and cake scraps I made a cake "dough" with leftover buttercream like you would to make cake pops. I used this cake to finish the sculpt. In hindsight I wish I had made the cake bigger and done more carving instead but the cake was only for my immediate family as a nice treat and I didn't want to have too much left over. The cake is covered in fondant and all of the details were made with fondant and hand painted with the exception of the cracked face shield which was sugar glass made with isomalt. I also used some pearl dusts to dirty up the cake and make the astronaut look aged. I looked up some reference photos to turn the all blue design to a full color cake. The back drop is an original painting I made with spray paint. The idea is the image of Earth behind the Dead Astronaut haunting him from is resting place on the moon. I made the cake over a 2 day span after taking 3 days to select the design which was the hardest thing of all to do. I am fairly pleased with the cake and am excited to enter it against so many great cake and sugar artists whose work I love and respect so much. Added bonus... It was DELICIOUS!!