I was commissioned to paint a couple more lil’ Devils for a fan of Sanrio… yes, that Sanrio! The first one was meant to be a play on the Kuromi character, who I wasn’t familiar with. According to the Hello Kitty Wiki:
Kuromi is My Melody’s rival is a tomboy who loves making mischief and causing trouble! Although she may look tough, she is actually very girly and is attracted to good-looking guys!
Kuromi
Mischief?! She certainly sounds like she could be besties with Happi Devil! So interpreting her as a lil’ Devil was pretty easy, though I had a bit of a challenge figuring out what to do about the lil’ Devil horns. Without visible horns, the image didn’t really seem “devilish.” So I had Kuromi’s hat sorta strapped to the horns, rather than hidden underneath.
“Do I have to wear this?”
Then for the second painting, I was charged with the grand mistress herself, Hello Kitty! Which was daunting in the sense of how iconic she is. Sure, she is interpreted a million different ways, so its sort of a no brainer that she would translate well. The challenge was to merge the two and not just imitate. With my first draft, done in Illustrator, I think I kind of nailed it [which is the only reason why I’m including an image of that…!].
Hell Kitty Draft
They liked the draft, but ultimately wanted her to look a little meaner. So I tweaked the horns a bit and gave her a little grimace showing her teeth, which ended up being the final.
Hell Kitty Final
Check out the lil’ Devils page to see the rest of the lil Devil family!
So for the fun of it, I created a mock label for Campbell’s Chicken and Stars Soup. I used the old Cambell’s logo and dressed up one of the Campbell’s Kids in a David Bowie mash up of Space Oddity and Aladdin Sane.
The Original Can Layout
I kind of fell in love with the silliness of it and wanted to take it a bit further. So I recreated the entire label. Cooking instructions, ingredients, nutrition guide, bar code… all of it.
Since I didn’t want to do anything permanent [no harm, no foul, right?], i used a bit of double sided tape so that the label could stick to itself, rather than sticking to the “real” label on the can. Then took my Bowie Labels to the grocery store and dressed up the cans in something that was far more interesting than the real labels that Campbell’s currently has on its soup cans!
Call it a Random Act of Bowie. So I’m putting a PDF of the label up, for anyone would would like to Bowie Bomb some Campbell’s Chicken and Stars cans… !
