Outcome

I am from New York City. In the neighborhood that I live in, there is an area where many people create street art, and I often walked by pieces that I admired and thought were interesting. Sometimes one day I would notice a new piece of art, and the next day, someone else would have added their own touch to the piece. One piece I particularly liked and still remember is a piece that depicts Edward Snowden. It was very simple, only using black and white, which was a bit unusual since most of the time, the street art I saw was bright and colorful.

I thought it was a bit dangerous to create such a piece of art, but it was thrilling at the same time. A few days later it was painted over with white paint, probably because someone thought it would be offensive or perhaps dangerous to have art with Snowden in public.

I was grateful that someone had taken a picture of it, because I wasn’t able to during the time it was still up. I think this is a piece of art that someone would buy, because Snowden himself is iconic, and the artwork is simple yet striking. I wanted to change the initial meaning of the art and instead of it being somber and serious, create a piece with bright and contrasting colors to modify the mood of the art.

PopArt is a style that consists of bright, contrasting colors. I believed it would be fun to replicate this piece of art in the style of PopArt, because it was originally black and white, and was not too complex. I believed it would be similar to Mr. Brainwash’s style of art, who simply took other people’s art and changed simple things like the color of each work.

Initially, I thought it would be simple to create a piece of art using PopArt style, but I found it was difficult to do so, because the only piece I could find was a photograph of the street art, and the street art had been created on a steel storefront gate, so there was a texture that I could not be rid of. Although the art itself had been created using only black, it was created on a gray background so it was solid black and white.

I followed a tutorial to create my artwork, but wasn’t sure how each step contributed to the art piece as a whole.

I wasn’t quite sure how to create an image in a PopArt style, so I looked up a tutorial and used GIMP to create my art. I am not very experienced in using GIMP, so I relied on the tutorial, and used techniques such as blur and filtering to change the style of the original work to PopArt. The tutorial also mentioned using multiple layers and merging them together to end up with the final result.

The work is a definite contrast to the original, and editing it so that it is not as unconventional as the original changes the meaning of the original artwork. Instead, it is now a piece of art that mimics Snowden and what he has done so far. It is not as serious as the original was, and the bright colors betray the impact Snowden has had on the world.

Reflecting upon my art, I would do more research into how to create PopArt, because I simply followed the tutorial and wasn’t sure about what techniques I was using and how each technique would influence or change the original piece of art. The tutorial I used did not have any sort of "before" or "after" pictures so I could see what I would be producing in the end.