But what a campaign does is paint an image of a candidate in the public mind.

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For example, the jokes about Romney intentionally furthered the image Obama wanted to paint of Mitt, namely that he was very wealthy and out of touch with the average person.

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When Woodside, California, mom Dana Sanderson asked her daughter Kit, then 6, what would help her sleep alone, Kit decided she needed a bigger night-light and a "Mommy pillow, " a body pillow with her mom's image traced in fabric paint.

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Yet when the viewer moves closer to see how he did it, the image evaporates into a blur of paint.

ECONOMIST: Diego Vel��zquez

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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One way would be to use image manipulation software - such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro - to create a fake message that would look similar to the original, but with different content.

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Alas I am not a designer, I am merely a writer but, I can still perhaps help paint the picture in your collective heads by showing you the following image I found via Google Images.

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This playboy image has always been a caricature, albeit one that was easy to paint, partly because Mr Ellison has done so much to create it.

ECONOMIST: Face value