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Brenton Brookings

Brenton Brookings

brentonic.co

David Bowie Album Cover

This is a redesign of David Bowie’s classic 1972 album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” that I originally completed in the middle of my first year. I decided to revisit it after Bowie’s untimely passing on January 10th of this year.

David Bowie Album Cover by Brenton Brookings

Conceptually, I was inspired by Bowie’s cryptic storyline of an alien rockstar who visits earth to influence earth’s children. To capture a childlike, handcrafted aesthetic, I created an outer space background from felt, made a papier-mâché globe, and traced the title with a Crayola crayon.

David Bowie Album Cover by Brenton Brookings

The lyrics written by Bowie are one of the highlights of the album. They tell the tale of Ziggy Stardust, a prophetic, hedonistic alien rockstar who comes to earth in its final days to foretell the coming of the otherworldly Starman. It was an ideal exercise in microtypography.

David Bowie Album Cover by Brenton Brookings

I cut out the stars from glitter-covered foam.

David Bowie Album Cover by Brenton Brookings

For the label on the center of the disc, the papier-mâché globe once again makes an appearance. I made the papier-mâché from a torn-up issue of The Stranger and painted it with fluid acrylic paint.

I used myself as a model for the Starman, the black hole-jumping infinite who, per Bowie’s story, has come to save the world. I cut the silhouette out from felt. I combined most of the separate elements in Photoshop and set the type in InDesign.

David Bowie Album Cover by Brenton Brookings