Destroy The Icon - Coleman Criss

    This project came into existence relatively quick for me. I read the prompt and instantly knew that I wanted to do something regarding politics given that it is such a big part of our daily lives thanks to social media.  

     To start, I picked four of the more recent high-profile politicians to work with.  I chose Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush. 

     My first step was removing the background and then "chopping up" the images of my icons.

     My second step was to bring everything into greyscale.

     After that, I took my scanned image of my American flag and made an overlay layer over the images. Since one of the images had to have a pattern element, I repeated the flag layer 4 times for the Bush image, then set them in a grid on my image in 1/4 scale.

     To finish, I added some last minute minor adjustments to the brightness and contrast and also uploaded an image of a redacted document to the files and converted the layer to the "divide" setting to get that see-through, almost negative look to the image.

The general idea I had going into this project regarding my creative process was to make a commentary on politicians and their secrets.  It seems like in a world where there's so many different ideas regarding who's right and who's wrong, everyone seems to forget that regardless of what side we're on, we all are just as human as anyone else and we all have secrets. We all make mistakes and hide things from the public eye. The figures are meant to represent the different viewpoints, the American flag represents the general public that the secrets are being kept from, and the redacted document and building block-like pattern represent the secrets themselves.