Lichtenstein Onomatopoeia

Continuing with our Pop Art unit, 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 started off the project by talking about words that are oftentimes seen in comics, such as whaam, pow, wow, zap, zip, boom, pow, etc. These words are called 'onomatopoeias.' Onomatopoeias are words that sound like what they look like. Our first day we learned how to make box letters and then drew an onomatopoeia word that way.

The second day of class, we outlined our word with sharpie and then used tempera cakes to paint them using a primary color. Then we began to assemble our background. We cut out shapes and explosions out of primary colored paper and glued them to our background. The last step of their background was to add a large explosion cut out of newspaper to their background that went on top of all their other shapes. This was so that their words wouldn't blend into their background.

On the third day, they cut out their words and glued them onto their background. Then we painted the tops to legos using the primary colors and used those to print ben-day dots onto our backgrounds. Lastly, they cut out details to add to their art such as puffs of air, lightning bolts, small explosions, etc. I told them to think about their word and to choose details that would be appropriate for that word.

I thought this little artist did a great job drawing their word!

So much action in the hallways!