Alexa Meade combines painting , photography and patience to manipulate viewers ' perceptions and create visual riddles by meticulously covering her subjects , and their environments , in thick strokes of paint until they resemble actual paintings . The idea came to her following a stint in politics after college , and deciding to channel the fakery and duplicity common to the political realm into something creative . `` I really got to view the political spin machine up close , '' Meade says . `` Everything before it reaches you has in some way been processed and repackaged to present a story that is fitting to somebody else 's agenda . And I kind of saw this idea of taking shadows and painting them on top of themselves , taking people and painting them on top of themselves , as repackaging the same base information and turning it into something that appears completely new on the surface . But deep down is the same person ; it 's the same message , but with my veneer of reinterpretation on top of it . '' Read more : Watch Bitcoin become a financial battlefield in these amazing charts . Using the colors and values of her subjects as a guide , Meade paints them , deftly overwriting the natural visual cues that give them their depth and form . The striking result is like someone wearing a costume of themselves . She 's played with several variations on the theme , blending her subjects into street art , bathtubs full of milk , interactive installations , even photographing one 's travels on the DC subway system after being painted . It 's an effective optical illusion that often creates great results , but Meade -- who is n't a trained painter -- is motivated less by representing life than by getting people to question what they 're seeing . `` There are a lot of things in this world that we take as a complete given , '' she says , `` But we do n't necessarily stop to take that step to think , 'OK , well what is actually underlying all of this ? ' '' This is n't an entirely new concept . Boo Ritson painted her subjects in a similar fashion in the middle of the last decade , albeit in a flatter style and with a reduced color palette . Something about Meade 's approach resonated with viewers , though , and her experiments went viral . Read more : Say goodbye to the iPod classic . Beyond broadly representing their subjects , Meade 's pictures reflect her excitement about articulating ideas . She 's more likely to invoke Borges or Plato than Rembrandt or Duchamp when discussing her work . Meade found her artistic path shortly after earning her degree in political science and working on Barack Obama 's 2008 campaign . She quickly found herself intrigued by shadows and what they represent . Painting over the shadows cast by people , objects , fences on blades of grass , eventually she was painting more than just the shadows and seeing an allegory in painting reality on itself . `` I wanted to find a way to capture them and give this intangible absence of shape form and color — not all the shadows I paint are black . They 're all sorts of different colors . So that evolved into painting shadows onto people , and all of a sudden I was turning people into paintings without even realizing it . '' Read more on WIRED : . Braving stings and insane heights with the honey hunters of Nepal . A futurist on why lawyers will start becoming obsolete this year . Guys like this could kill Google Glass before it ever gets off the ground .
Alexa Meade creates mind-warping photos by covering her subjects in thick strokes of paint . The artist says she uses the technique to create images that are both surreal and surreal. The artist tries to make the viewer think about what is beneath the surface . Meade 's experiments with visual riddles went viral .