The painting

The assignment was an appropriation: take a famous painting and try to recreate it. The Scream has always been my favorite, not for its notoriety, but for what it does with anxiety. It externalizes something interior. I already had a small novelty air freshener of the painting hanging in my car, which actually became my main thumbnail reference.

Recreating it by hand forced me to study why the original composition feels so tense: the way the background twists, the claustrophobic framing of the figure, and the overwhelming weight of the colors. The goal wasn’t to make a perfect copy, but to understand the image by physically rebuilding it.

The Scream oil painting at the beginning stage, with the canvas on an easel.

Canvas on the easel · beginning stage

The Scream oil painting in progress, showing the composition and color beginning to develop.

In progress · color and form developing

Final painting, scanned Final scanned oil painting of The Scream showing a reinterpretation of Edvard Munch's The Scream.

The comic

The painting was submitted to the Lol JK issue of the NMC Magazine, an issue dedicated entirely to comedy and humor. I scanned the canvas and digitally added speech bubbles coming out of the figures’ mouths.

The foreground figure says: “Oh no! Is that Jeff and Shaleia behind me?” The shadowy figures in the background respond: “We found your twin flame!!!” The reference is local. Twin Flames Universe is a cult based in Suttons Bay, twenty minutes from campus, the subject of several documentaries. The iconic face of terror in The Scream suddenly takes on a hilarious new meaning, trapped in a landscape where the leaders of a local internet cult are chasing you down.

Magazine page layout Magazine page layout of The Scream with speech bubbles added for the NMC Magazine, Lol JK humor issue.

The greeting cards

The painting eventually moved into greeting cards. The image already carried drama, so the copy leaned into that tension and redirected it toward apology and birthday humor.

One card begins with Sorry. Inside, it reads, “But it’s really not worth screaming about.” The birthday versions use the same emotional exaggeration in a different direction: panic becomes celebration.

I wrote the copy, designed the layouts, created the back colophons, and built my own initials mark in Illustrator. It was a fun challenge to turn a single canvas into a physical line of products without losing the initial absurdity that made the joke work in the first place.

Card mockup Mockup showing greeting cards created from The Scream, Reimagined painting.

Front of apology greeting card using The Scream painting with the word Sorry.

Apology card · front

Front of birthday greeting card using The Scream painting with birthday copy.

Birthday card · front

Back of The Scream birthday card showing the colophon, self-portrait photograph, and initials mark.

Birthday card · back colophon

Back of The Scream apology card showing the colophon, self-portrait photograph, and initials mark.

Apology card · back colophon

The animation

For an animation assignment, I returned to the scanned painting and broke the scream apart. The eyes, mouth, and expression became separate moving pieces.

The eyes roll and expand. The mouth stretches wider. Letters spew out, spinning across the frame, and then re-form into the word screaming, before transforming into The Scream, rendered in a typeface that matched the historic, hand-carved look of the era.

For the widescreen version, I extended the painting outward by hand in Photoshop, building side panels composed of digital painting that matched the original composition.

"Letters spew out, spinning across the frame, and then re-form to create the word, Screaming and then The Scream.”

Portrait format · original canvas dimensions

Widescreen format · hand-painted side panels

The same scream kept changing form

Each version kept the emotional core of the image, but changed what the scream was doing.

In the painting, the figure is screaming from raw, internal anxiety. In the magazine, it's screaming because it's being chased by a local internet cult. In the greeting cards, that panic is redirected into an exaggerated joke you can physically open and mail to a friend. Finally, in the animation, The Scream breaks apart completely, turning the soundless terror into literal motion and flying typography.