When I found out I was interviewing with Muse, I looked thoroughly into their work and was really inspired by their concepts for the key art of the new theatre production of Animal Farm so I threw this project together quickly in an evening to present to them at my interview in the morning. When creating this piece, I didn’t want to just copy their work or concepts so i decided to take a different approach that would highlight the themes of the original book as opposed to the play.
I started exploring United States presidential portraits of the past and ended up creating a presidential portrait for the main pigs inspired by Barack Obama’s portrait painted by Kehinde Wiley.
I believe I created a strong proof of concept considering the relatively short timeframe I had to work on it. I started by sketching out roughly what I thought it could look like, with a focus on the pig sitting on the chair. The most challenging part was photo compositing, where I wanted to put the pig in a suit and give it more human proportions to represent the end of the book where the animals struggled to differentiate the pigs from the original humans.
I relied heavily on photo compositing and used the oil paint feature on Photoshop to give it an actual painted look. It was a bit of a learning curve, but I found it to be a smart and effective way to achieve my desired outcome. By using these tools, I was able to create a portrait that had a striking resemblance to Obama’s portrait, but with a subtle twist that made it unique to my project.
