Artifact Making Of

By Kyl Wellman

Tools used: iScissor, GIMP

I started with a picture of my dog, Willis. This picture was taken when he had a cone on his head, so iScissor found the image boundary easily.
I used my implementation of iScissor to make this mask of Willis's face.
Shepard Fairey's Obama seemed to share Willis's insightful expression. I planned to replace Obama's visionary gaze into the distance with Willis's. The limited color palette made this image play nicely with iScissor as well.
I used iScissor to create a second mask, this one to remove Obama's face from the image. GIMP easily inverted the colors to keep all but the face rather than just the face.
I had to do a bit of work within GIMP to create the final image. First, I converted Willis's face to an indexed image using only a 4 color palette. I wasn't able to use the thin blue lines that Fairey used, so I just used white, red, dark blue and light blue to replace the colors that GIMP found in the original image. To finish the artifact, I colored in the rest of the background, cropped the image and replaced Obama's singular vision with Willis's.