Pop art 2: Roy Lichtenstein
Manipulating Images - Lesson 2
Objectives
- To use a range of photo editing tools and techniques to create a pop art style image
- To effectively work with multiple layers in an image
- To successfully use the lasso tool to edit parts of an image
Lesson Resources
Lesson 1 - Pop art 1: Andy Warhol
Lesson 2 - Pop art 2: Roy Lichtenstein
Lesson 3 - Alien landscapes
Lesson 4 - Investigating digital sculpture
Lesson 5 - A sculpture for the real world pt 1
Lesson 6 - A sculpture for the real world pt 2
Introduction
Begin by recapping the last lesson. Ask the class:
- What did we create?
- Which artist’s style were we replicating?
- What is pop art?
- We used the website Pixlr, can you remember any of the tools and techniques we used to create our image?
Roy Lichtenstein's pop art
Introduce the artist Roy Lichtenstein.
“Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York in 1923. He became famous for his bright and bold paintings of comic strip cartoons as well as his paintings of everyday objects. He was one of a group of artists making art in the 1960s who were called pop artists because they made art about 'popular' things such as TV, celebrities, fast food, pop music and cartoons.
Lichtenstein chose colours carefully, to imitate the four colours of printers’ inks. He also used Ben Day dots, a system invented to increase the range of colours available to newspaper printing.”
(Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/kids/explore/who-is/who-roy-lichtenstein)
Main task
We’re going to use more photo editing techniques to try and create an image that is inspired by Lichtenstein’s comic book style.
Here’s a couple of examples of celebrities Rihanna and Neymar Jr.
Ask the students to compare them with their original photos, what has been done to the image to create the style?
Here’s some of the things they might spot:
- Parts of the photos have been replaced by more solid blocks of colour,
- the backgrounds have been removed and replaced by solid colour that complement the image,
- a dot effect has been added to the face areas
- the colours of the facial areas have been simplified
- certain features have been accentuated with outlines.
Ask the students to talk with a partner, do you have any ideas on how we might be able to achieve some of these things? It’s not important here that they know the exact details of tools, filters etc that have been used, but you should hope that some students think back to the tools they used in the last lesson and consider how they could be applied here. For example, the lasso tool will be helpful for isolating parts of the image to apply effects to. Layers will also be used for a similar reason.
Let’s get started! First thing is to find an image to use. This should again be a close up of a person’s head and shoulders at most, not full body shots. Lichtenstein often created close up images in his comic book style so we’ll do the same.
We also don’t want the image to be too big or high quality so when searching for an image in Google Images go to Tools > Size and choose Medium.
Setting up your layers with Pixlr
Open Pixlr.com and choose Pixlr E.
Open the editor and choose Open Image, browse for the image of a person that you have saved and load it into Pixlr.
In the Layers box, click the padlock icon to unlock the layer. This allows you to make changes to it.
Then duplicate the layer with the button at the bottom of the layers window.
Then go back to the Layers box and add a new empty layer by clicking the + sign.
You should now have the background layer at the bottom, the background copy in the middle, and the new empty layer 3 on top.
Adding halftone
Select the bottom layer and untick the middle and top layers.
We will apply a filter to this layer to create the dotted effect that Lichtenstein used on the skin of the people in his works. This effect is known as halftone.
Go to the Filter menu and choose Halftone
Adjust the frequency slider until you can see the dotted effect, but still clearly make out the original image. In this example we’ve set it to 100, but yours may vary depending on the image you are using. Apply the changes when you’re happy.
Then re-tick the middle and top layers in the Layers box.
Colour blocking your image
The next step is to begin to try and make the image look more cartoon-like, to match the style of Lichtenstein’s work. Select the empty top layer and zoom into the hair of the person in your image.
Use the colour picker tool to select the most dominant colour in the hair part of the image.
Then select the paintbrush tool and set it to a fairly narrow hard round brush (5-10 px).
Carefully colour in ONLY the hair area and eyebrows. Reinforce to the students that zooming in really helps, as does using a thinner brush to get into tighter corners. They don’t need to cover every single strand of hair but get the main sections covered in one solid colour.
Next, if any clothing is visible in the image, scroll down to that and repeat the process just done with the hair. Select the dominant colour, and colour over the clothing with one block of colour. We are purposely removing detail to get the cartoonized style of Lichtenstein.
Colour round the edges with a smaller brush.
Then use a larger brush to colour in the centre.
Adding highlights
Next we’ll put back some of the image’s details in a simplified way. Right-click the top layer that we’ve been adding colour to. Reduce the opacity slider so that the layer beneath can just be seen through it.
Draw back in some simple features (if appropriate). Notice here we’ve roughly added the green elements on the shirt - though no detail is added to the stars or ‘Brazil’ writing under the badge. The detail on the badge is removed and replaced with a solid blue area.
On the face add some thin (approx size 3 px brush) black outlines around some of the facial features. It depends on who the person is for how much to add. Some look better with more than others. Remind the students of the style of Lichtenstein’s work and the parts of the face where he used dark lines.
In these two examples more black has been added to the image of Rihanna. More around the eyes where she has make-up on in the original image, plus her lips have also been outlined. You do not need to add an outline to any part of the image. This can be done automatically later, just focus on highlighting facial features and clothing for now.
When you’re happy with the details that have been added, put the transparency of the top layer back up to 100.
Blending the layers
The only place we want to see the halftone (dotted) effect is on the skin of the person in our image. So hide the top and middle layers by unticking the boxes in the Layers section.
Select the polygon lasso tool.
Carefully click around the face, ears and neck of the person in your image. Encourage the students to zoom in to make this much easier and work round slowly and carefully. The selection needs to finish where it starts. As you complete the selection you’ll see a moving dotted line appear (‘the marching ants’).
At this point go to the Select menu and choose Invert selection. This will select everything in the image except the facial areas you clicked around.
Then simply press the delete or backspace key to remove the background.
Then deselect everything from the Select menu > Deselect.
Go back to the layers and show only the middle layer. We want to remove the background on this layer and leave just the person. Use the lasso tool to select and delete the background.
Then reorder your three layers by dragging the bottom (halftone/dotted) layer to the middle.
Final touches
To finish things off, flatten the layers of the image back into one layer. Select Layer > Flatten Image.
Then we’ll add a final black outline to the whole person in the image. This can be done quickly and neatly without having to go around the whole image with a brush by hand.
Go to Edit > Stroke and reduce the size slider down to between 3 and 5, so it matches the other dark lines on your work. Check the colour is on black and click Apply.
Then choose a single colour for your background and use the fill tool to apply it. Strong, vivid colours often work well. Try to choose a colour that accentuates or contrasts well with a colour already in the image.
Finally, if wanted, crop the image down to a size and shape that looks good. Select the crop tool and drag the handles on the box to show the area you want to keep, then press the enter key.
Here are three different versions of the finished example image, showing different background colours.
And here again, are two finished examples alongside the original images.
Save your work
Finally save your image to your computer. Click on File > Save. Choose PNG and give the file a new appropriate name before clicking DOWNLOAD.
This will save the image to the default download location on your computer. This is usually the Downloads folder. Some schools don’t allow students access to that folder, so if you need to save it to a different location, click DOWNLOAD and then right-click the link provided and choose save link as. Then browse to where you would like to save it.
If you need to save an unfinished piece of work to come back to at another time, when saving change the file format to PXD which will maintain the layers in the file, the others will force the image to be flattened which will be a problem if you still need to work on separate layers.
Plenary
And here’s our finished, Roy Lichtenstein inspired pop art! Compare it to the original, and ask teh class:
- What do you think?
- What did we do that matched the original style?
- Could you have improved anything?
- What was the hardest part? Why?
- Could you do it again independently?
- What skills do you need to practise most?
- How could you apply these skills to other projects in the future?