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!

The American Dream

For TMP graphic design, all the sections are in some completion on the American dream. I have no idea if it is just school wide or larger, but these are a few of the ideas I came up with.

I was originally none to excited about this project, I mean, the American dream? That's so many different things to so many people and it's really been done before. Many many times before.
But I guess there is a reason it's been done so many times before. It's quite interesting what comes out of you when you start thinking about the American dream. Also, it's a group project which can be not so much fun (my partner is good for this project though, so that's good).

I started wanting to skewer the whole idea of the dream and landed on the idea of manifest destiny (the idea that the early U.S. had the right and the duty to govern from Atlantic to Pacific) and American Imperialism in the past few decades.

I also have started into how broken the dream is here at home. Specifically the level of poverty and homelessness in this country being so high is appalling. I wanted to comment on that for the last piece.

I'm not sure which one my partner and I will chose to work on further and submit, but I'll keep posting!






Thank you for looking!