Lichtenstein Self-Portraits

We learned about the second most famous Pop Artist (behind Mr. Warhol), Roy Lichtenstein! Roy Lichtenstein started out as a graphic designer. One day, his kids challenged him to recreate a picture of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck that they had seen in a comic book. He took the challenge upon himself and recreated it perfectly. This would go on to spur his iconic style. He is most well-known for his paintings of comic book pictures. Many of his paintings depict women or scenes from WWII comics. He is also known for only using the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue). To create other colors, he used ben-day dots. If you have ever looked at a comic closely, the colors are made up of tiny dots of colors. If a bunch of red dots are placed closely together, the image appears red. If they red dots are spaced further apart so that there is more white space between them, the color begins to appear more purple. The primary colored dots can also be overlapped to give the appearance of other colors, such as putting red and blue on top of each other to create the illusion of purple.

We touched up on our organic and geometric shapes from kindergarten to start things off. Then we practiced cutting these shapes out of primary colored papers and gluing them down to our backgrounds. Students were expected to fill up a good chunk of their paper.

The second day, we got a crash course on the proportions of the face. We really emphasized drawing our eyes in the middle of our head and NOT on our forehead. After drawing their self-portrait, they traced it with a sharpie. Lastly, they used bubble wrap to prints dots using the primary colors onto their backgrounds. The bubble wrap prints look king of like large ben-day dots like Lichtenstein used.

While I had fun with the project, I need to come up with a more effective way to teach this one.Maybe draw the shapes on next year with markers instead of cutting them out of paper?