Dia de la Abby #34: Pop Art Skull

This was inspired by the works of two of my favorite pop artists, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Warhol did screen prints of popular culture items of 1960s, the time period he was doing his most famous work. Lichtenstein did cartoonish paintings using a dot method found in printed comics. I also recently watched "Exit Through the Gift Shop" and was interested in Mr. Brainwash, who used Photoshop to create colorful work. I wonder what Warhol and Lichtenstein's work would look like now with the aid of technology like Photoshop? I'm glad that technology wasn't around when they were working, or I don't think I would enjoy their art as much.



I would normally write a tutorial for this, but I didn't take photos of the process since it was a lot of not so pretty experimentation. However, here is a basic description of how I painted it.

I tried to combine the two. I don't own a screen printing system, so I took one of the images I created in Photoshop (the third one) and used it as a reference for shading placement. I was playing around with layered effects in Photoshop to see if I could create a pop art image that would work well for this painting.

I painted the entire canvas in two layers of hot pink paint. The small kitten paws you see were due to my kitten stepping on the canvas while the 1st layer of pink was drying. They were too cute not to leave. I painted around them when I made a second coat of paint. The paint I use is non-toxic, so she wasn't harmed by the paint.

I used bright green acrylic paint to paint out where I wanted the different shaded areas. I suppose this is called under painting. Then, using a darkened green (bright green with a few drops of black) I painted the dark green areas you see. Using black, I painted the black parts. I made sure to make defined outlines of the skull details, as is would be for a cartoon.

Using the other end of the paint brush, I dipped it in the paint to make the dots. This was the most tedious part and is inconsistent in spacing. There is probably a better way to make even dots. The dots are in bright green for the dark green sections and dark green for the bright green and black sections. After all the dots were placed, I re-outlined details in black, because they were obscured by the dots too much for my liking.

Every week in the 4.0 year, I will post my own Dia de la Abby posts as well as a tutorial with instructions on how I made my piece. Hopefully you feel inspired by my posts just as I was by Noah's Skull-A-Day 1.0 daily project. Need more of me than just a weekly dose, follow me on Facebook.