This was actually started last summer (‘11) in the early days of joining the art class. Thinking I just needed to get back into using a brush and paint and actually finish something I tackled this classic pop art in acrylics thinking it would be quick, easy and confidence building.
However it turned out to be awkward and time consuming. The acrylics worked really well, they give strong even colours - they are the paint equivalent of “colouring in”. Some of the fine straight black lines were going to be impossible (for me) with a brush, so Hansa (teacher) suggested cheating with a pen! It certainly helped to get crisp lines but meant even more care to avoid the ink running into the acrylic or the paint dissolving and spreading the ink. Perhaps a water insoluble pen would be better, but then would it be possible to paint over it?
The small text was also going to be problematic. Not an issue on a big canvas, but at small scale reproducing the font wasn’t going to happen, even with a pen. So again a cheat ~ I’ve clipped out the text from a digital copy of the original, scaled and then inkjet printed onto transparent water decal paper courtesy Crafty computer paper. Sprayed with acrylic varnish to seal it all up.
Overall the piece looks OK but there are quite a lot of spot-the-difference bits and some of the boundaries between colours aren’t as sharp as I’d like but… not bad for a return to art. Back to my ancient A-level skills maybe.
What’s not to like about Roy Lichtenstein’s work? I remember coming across Whaam! (not to be confused with a naff ’80s pop duo) as a kid and really liking its striking visual impact. While it helped that I liked planes and read comics, I suspect that many kids would find Lichtenstein a very accessible artist. Adults can find a more sophisticated subtext about the modern ubiquity of images and smugly identify him as a contemporary of Warhol.