Manifest Destiny: The American Dream

So, Laura and I finished our American dream poster this afternoon. We're both quite happy with it. When the whole project was assigned, I was a bit dubious about the assignment being on the American dream. As I said in a previous post, how hackneyed can you get? I had images of apple pie, immigrants and the statue of liberty.

Laura and I skewered that whole idea. Manifest Destiny baby. Spread by the bullet of course. I would say were commenting on the whole idea of American imperialism. Of course we don't call it that anymore, we call it "spreading democracy" or "protecting freedom", but it's a watered down version of colonialism. This time with 24 hour press coverage. And bombs. But the bullets have always been there.

The visual style of our piece was inspired by the British graffiti artist Banksy that I had talked about earlier. The piece below is what directly inspired me. It's in the solider.

So we took our idea on manifest destiny as the American dream and our Banksy inspiration and came up with this piece. The solider is shooting red, white, and blue bullets at a American flag world. Cause we want to own/command it (if that wasn't obvious).
We photoshoped it onto a wall because of our graffiti artist inspiration, both of us saw this as a graffitiesque subversive piece I think and putting it on a wall incorporated that idea for us. The text is read as off the wall because it is the title for the poster that this will be printed as (it prints with a white 1/2 inch border). Oh the whole poster size it 17"x11" printed. We did it mostly in Adobe Photoshop with some Illustrator as well.
It may not be a 'normal' poster, but I really like it and think it would be a good bit of fun to actually graffiti it somewhere in A2. We'll see if that ever happens.


Thanks for looking!