For my Design for Music class I redesigned David Bowie's album art for Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. While I like the original album art, I felt that it was a bit too sombre and thought I'd take a crack at cranking up the psychedelia all the way up to 11.
I had a lot of fun trying to incorporate all the symbolism Bowie included in his lyrics about the doomed, androgynous, messianic Ziggy while trying to evoke space and the mad scribblings of a visitor from outer space trying to save us from destroying ourselves. All in a day's work for the leper messiah with God given ass.
I had a lot of fun trying to incorporate all the symbolism Bowie included in his lyrics about the doomed, androgynous, messianic Ziggy while trying to evoke space and the mad scribblings of a visitor from outer space trying to save us from destroying ourselves. All in a day's work for the leper messiah with God given ass.
In the humble beginnings of this project, I knew Ziggy's costumes would have to play an important role. I initially tried forming a digital collage out of Kansai Yamamoto's clothes for Bowie's tour, layer the strange fabric textures (and the odd bunny) over Bowie's body as he struck a pose, only his eye peeking through the Technicolor madness.
Taking a step back, I realized I didn't really like the overall feel of this approach and manually cutting up bits of the costumes was proving tedious. However, soon after, a fun printing error occurred where I didn't flip the paper in the tray properly and I ended up with two layers of Bowie images being printed one on top of the other. This seemed much more visually interesting and added a sense of darkness to the piece that seemed to evoke the themes of decay Bowie was crooning about. After that, things just fell into place. A portal that doubled as a symbol for a vagina emerged from behind the figures, one of a full man, one of just a beheaded outfit in an almost Christ-like pose (another serendipitous discovery of one of Bowie's outfits). Pushing the sexual ambiguity to hopefully its limit of acceptability and not overdoing it, a small "+the Spiders from Mars" appeared between the figure's legs and the track list was scrawled on the back cover.
