College Student was Obama 'Joker' Artist
UPI
Aug 19, 2009
LOS ANGELES -- A Chicago college student has been identified as the artist who developed a portrait of President Barack Obama as the Joker from the movie "The Dark Knight."
Firas Alkhateeb, a 20-year-old history major at the University of Illinois, says it took him four or five hours of computer work to come up with the now-infamous portrait, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.
Alkhateeb says it began last winter when he found a tutorial on the Internet that told how to "Jokerize" people using Adobe Photoshop.
He downloaded a Time magazine cover of the president from October 2008 and proceeded to follow instructions on how to transform Obama.
Alkhateeb says he placed his work on the photo-sharing site Flickr where some unknown person discovered it.
That unknown person digitally removed the references to Time magazine, captioned the picture with the word "socialism" and put up printed copies throughout Los Angeles.
----
Sound Off...What do you think? Join the discussion
Copyright 2009 by UPI
