The 29-year-old Swedish artist wanted to prove to himself that he was good enough to paint a work that could pass as a photograph.

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An artist could typically paint 10 such copies a day, he said.

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But he also tried to paint a hopeful picture of a divided government that could work through differences.

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He said the yellow material found on Miss Manning's face could have come from paint.

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Deputy Paint said he was available on telephone, mobile and email so people could get hold of him easily without needing to use Twitter.

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Craig Pinckney, 34, a shipping manager at a Connecticut environmental laboratory, seriously considered trading in his Alienware Area 51 tower (complete with a cyborg-green paint job) for the new Doom 3 machine, but decided he could just upgrade his processor and video card instead.

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Instead of painting their portraits by hand, he adapted a technique from commercial printing, in which a photographic image could be transferred to canvas by pushing paint through a mechanically-produced silkscreen template.

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