Pop Art (1960s-)
Pop Art, a movement that emerged in America in the 1960s but began in Europe in the mid-1950s, challenged preconceived and traditional notions of what art should be by using images from popular culture, including advertisements, comic books, and ordinary everyday objects, as opposed to depicting what some considered more "deserving" subjects. A famous example is Andy Warhol's picture of a Campbell's Soup Can. Some people at the time, or even today for that matter, criticize pop art, saying that it isn't true art. However, one of this movement's main focus was to move away from elitist art and instead show objects one would see in everyday life, often taken out of context and portrayed with a sense of irony. This movement changed the way that many people viewed art and helped to develop the common opinion today that art can be anything the artists want's it to be.
Roy Lichtenstein
The main artist we will be focusing on in our Pop Art unit is Roy Liechtenstein, a leader of this movement. Famous for his work with comic strips, Lichtenstein often infused a dry humor into his work, with the sense that he was poking fun at his subjects. Many of his comics feature crying women and crashing airplanes with the words "Wham!" or "Crash!" drawn in. In his pieces, he used only primary colors and Halftones to represent show the different colors. Roy Liechtenstein was an important figure in developing comics as an art form, furthering the Pop Art movement, and widening the world's perception of art.
To create these two pieces, I first adjusted the Levels of the picture increase the brightness of the color and I applied the Film Grain filter to give the picture an old photograph quality. Then, in an new layer above this one, I applied the Color Halftone filter to create the dotted look, and then set this layer's setting to Darken (or sometimes overlay if that the picture became to dark), making the picture clearer. Lastly I put a stroke around the edge of the pictures and added a speech bubble or thought bubble with text. For the lower piece, I repeated these steps 5 times and then merged all of the documents into one to create a comic strip.
Cartoon Portraits, with Halftone Pattern