Things you can do: Bowie bust

A few things that led up to the Bowie bust:

1. I cannot not buy crappy busts in thrift stores if they are under $5. I love them.

2. Since I continue to buy them, the whole “spraypaint it a bright color!” thing is getting a little overdone in my apartment.

3. When I moved into my apartment, I turned a large portion of one of the living room walls into a giant chalkboard for calendar/grocery list purposes. Every time I have a party, the chalkboard tends to get covered in crudely drawn penises. Like so:

4. To see if we could avoid the wall o’ dicks at the party we had a couple of weeks ago, my boyfriend came up with this idea, which is harder than you’d think:

5. The crappily drawn (I can say it, I drew it) cover of Aladdin Sane (far left, middle row) has therefore been staring at me for about two weeks now (I’ve found myself humming Ziggy Stardust while making dinner for no reason several times), so the obvious thing to do was glam old Napoleon up.

Materials:

1 crappy thrift-store bust

White spraypaint

Pink/lavender, red, blue and black paint (nail polish would probably work, too)

1 picture of Aladdin Sane (here, I’ll just give you one)

So if you did Warhammer as a kid… this would be the time to pull out the old teensy paintbrush. I do not have one; in fact, I have never even heard of Warhammer. I ended up using my smallest paintbrush and a needle for the detail work.

First you take that sucker and spraypaint it white. Be patient and use two or three thin coats, giving them time to dry in between, otherwise it’ll get goopy and drippy. Then get out whatever you’re using as paints:

First, give the whole face a light-pink/lavender coat, then shade in the cheekbones and eyes etc. with a darker pink. THEN comes the big lightning bolt, and save the black for last.

At first I was going to leave his eyes open, but it was too creepy and I just painted eyelids over them.

I was fortunate enough to have won a set of iridescent paints at Art for the Cash Poor last weekend, and they were perfect as a top coat. I’m sure glitter nail polish would work, too.

And now Napoleon Stardust may take his place amongst the other tchotchkes on the Anal-Retentive Bookshelf of Happiness!

P.S. Extra special bonus points if you can identify all the albums: