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information

After a long absence from painting, I restarted with a spontaneous variation on the American flag, similar to terrorist attack. I wanted to do something graffiti-like, with bold lettering. "Free Me" is a short catchphrase which fit my state of mind after a long period of emotional turmoil.

Adding the background image of Mount Rushmore, the founding fathers of the United States carved in stone, only developed later on. I think that's a nice graphical allusion to the slogan, and it connects beautifully to the American flag.

date Aug 2003
time 3 days
object T-shirt
technique brushtracefreehand

creation

I had drawn the graffiti-like lettering on a sheet of paper. I retraced the final pencil shape with a black felt-tip pen, so that I could use the bold dark lines for tracing. After painting the outlines of the letters, the rest of the letters was done free-hand.
I didn't want to use the computer to scale the background image, so I just did a quick enlarged sketch on a piece of paper, which I then used to do a little bit of tracing on the shirt. Again, most of the background was done free-hand.


sources

source Mount Rushmore


overview

Free Me.overview


closeup

Free Me.closeup
Free Me version 1 outline
Free Me version 2 filled letters
Free Me version 3 filled letters with stars
Free Me version 4 almost complete

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The images by Ingo Karkat on this page are licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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