Pop Art Portraits

4th Grade is finishing up their unit in Pop Art, they took a look at the work of Roy Lichtenstein and his use of color as well as the Benday dot style he used.

Students first drew the outline of their face, they used a caricature style to keep the facial features simple.

After drawing the portrait, students outlined their face with a thin sharpie.

After outlining the face, students drew diagonal lines across the face lightly, these lines will serve as the lines in which to put the benday dots.

Students put dots on the lines in a brown, red, yellow, peach, or orange color. Most students chose a color similar to their skin color.

After finishing with the dots, students erase the pencil lines underneath, and create a different dot pattern for hair, shirt and background.

Students color with colored pencil under the dots and create an interesting background.

After finishing with the portrait and the background, students create a caption and cut it out, adding it to their portrait.

Warhol Style Gridwork

4th grade is studying the Pop Art movement and more specifically Andy Warhol.  

Pop art challenged traditions of fine art by including images from popular culture (News, advertising.)

1968 Warhol

Students learned how to draw using a grid; they first worked on a 1:1 grid, this means 1 inch on the image is equal to 1 inch on their new grid. After practicing a 1:1 grid, students moved onto a large grid.  Our size for our final grid is about 1:50.  They turned an example of Warhol's famous Tomato soup can (1 small sheet of paper) into 50 separate grid sheets creating one group project.

Students worked together to assemble the grid on the floor and fixing any mistakes along the way.  They used problem solving skills to correct any mistakes along the way.  Instead of everyone working separate, students formed groups of 5-7 students and that group was in charge of 10 sheets in the grid. 

After problem solving, they tried it again and the second time it was even better!

After this second practice session, students were ready for their final draft.  On watercolor paper, students drew the can again, after drawing they outlined their sections with crayons.  The crayon color helped students figure out which section they would be painting.

I could not be more pleased with how great this final product looks; after the first practice day, students were convinced it would be a disaster but to their delight, it was a success!

Students will install these around school with a short bit of information about Andy Warhol.  

I will have more pictures to come, I was just too excited not to post this!

Our School's spin on the logo