Last night, my boredom drove me to upload a picture of me into Adobe Photoshop to aid me in the exaggerations of my caricatures. By using the smear tool, I started dragging attributes of my face to increase or decrease them in size. I thought this would help me get a better idea of how to exaggerate without losing likeness, but it didn't work out so well. Somehow I started thinking about the artist Shepard Fairey and his iconic artwork entitled " The Barack Obama Hope Poster". I thought that it would be funny to create the same poster, in the same style but of The Pope. It sucks that I just decided this two years late because someone had already created it as you can see here. This wasn't surprising though.

Instead, I found the original image that Fairey used to create The Obama Hope Poster and I tried to create my propaganda using it also. I used Fairey's image to retrieve the color palette he used, but I did not reference his photo for my work. I wanted to see what I could come up just by finding similar colors within the face, pointing and clicking the mouse (yeah.. no tablet) on different tones with the correct color, and filling each accordingly. I started using the gradient tool by filling in all the midtones, shades, and highlights with the four color palette needed to render a similar image. After pathing all the different colored shapes with the pen tool, (magic wand is for sissies), I cleaned the edges with the gradient and the brush tools by selecting and inverting specific areas.

After I finished this long process,I had to figure out what else could rhyme with the slogan HOPE that would be funny or witty like the Pope idea. I came up with "SOAP." I know, I know.. It's no Pope, but someone had already used "DOPE" ,on President Bush, and there aren't many words that rhyme with hope. Most of them have already been used: NOPE, MOPE, POPE.. but not SOAP..or COPE to my surprise. I went with soap first. For some reason, the only word that was synonymous with the word soap to me, at the time, was Mr. Clean. I decided to change Obama into Mr. Clean. I changed his eye brows white, removed his hair line to indicate that he was completely bald like the beloved spokes person, but I still couldn't tell who he was. I needed to bring in the BIG guns... literally!

My Obama wasn't Mr. Clean. I thought to myself, what makes Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean? His arms!!! His earring!! I inserted a picture I downloaded of the real Mr. Clean. I removed his arm from the photo and implanted it onto Obama. At this point, I returned to my mundane process of pointing and clicking on different tones to create areas of color that unify the composition and the values we see on Obama's face. I cleaned the edges of the arm, positioned it on my Obama, and proceeded to write the word "SOAP" at the bottom. To finish it off, I used the marquee tool to create his earring and pathed out a highlight it look round.

After reviewing the OBEY artist's Obama, I realized that my method is very close to the process that Fairey used to create this image. We almost created the same color layers in the same exact sections. Well I'm sure you have seen his Obama a million times everywhere. You might find mine in my bathroom, cleaning the toilet.. 'Mr. Obama, Mr. Obama!'