ANDY WARHOL

HIMSELF HIS WORK

Andy Warhol was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as Pop Art. In the mid-20th century he produced iconic silkscreen paintings of subjects as mundane as soup cans and as glamorous as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. These remain hugely popular, and have sparked countless imitations by amateurs.

BASICS

SILKSCREEN TECHNIQUEThe silkscreen technique forces paint onto canvas through a high-contrast negative stencil attached to the fabric. The resulting image features strong blacks from the photograph, which can be simulated using Photoshop’s Threshold adjustment. In Warhol’s hands, crude blocks of garish, striking colour were added to selected areas, and images were often duplicated with alternative colour schemes.

I’m going to create my own Andy Warhol Style image using Photoshop and I’m going to illustrate the process I went through to create my image, using print screens and an explanation of what I did.

To start off I opened the image of myself in Photoshop and this was my template for my image. Before I started to do any editing, I noticed that a huge problem I was going to have would be that, the jumper I’m wearing is almost the same colour as the wall behind me. So when I come to cutting round me, and erasing the back ground with the magic wand, it will be difficult so I will have to use the actual eraser, zoom in and get rid of the background that way.

I wanted to have a really bright background that the black would stand out against it so I chose to have bright red.

Next I drew round my jumper and coloured this with a different colour to stand out from the red. I found this bit hard as I wasn’t sure what to do because the power point I was following confused me.

To capture the features on my face and body I change the contrast of the photo to the point where you can recognise the features, without the black over powering the image and it looking like a blur. In the image I’ve print screened I’ve done it to just the right contrast and you can tell it’s right from looking at the original.

After contrasting the picture I needed to draw round my face to shape of my hair outline and fill it in with colour using the brush tool. You can clearly see the features now against the face and it works really well. I must admit, I was still very confused when I got up to this bit, and I had to get my teacher to help me and give me some guidance on what to do next, but I grasped it in the end.

This is my final completed image and I’ve really grasped the Warhol element. I think that this sort of work requires patience and concentration because it’s very confusing in parts. All I have to do now is change the colours and create a photo collage with 4 different colour balanced photos.