Warhol Inspired Digital Artworks

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Comment by kendra Farrell on February 9, 2012 at 3:42pm

Vanessa wrote about how this was done...I had the students watch a short video on Andy Warhol screen-printing, I also made a hand out that digged a bit deeper into the history behind Pop Art and the political side to it.

This Unit is in conjunction to the MYP big idea of "The Human Condition: Individuals & Culture." The guiding question was " How has art influenced culture?" In English and in Social Studies they studied propaganda, how to identify it, and also the influence of media upon culture and then themselves.

So that set the stage for students to look at political art and tools that artists use to influence the feeling they communicate through their artwork by their color choices. Students learned about the color wheel but instead of starting with a traditional painting project of the color wheel, students learned how to create a color wheel using Adobe Photoshop. Students also learned about other important tools in Adobe Photoshop.

This led into a study of Andy Warhol and his screen-prints of famous people. He was known for taking a photograph and simplifying it into a just a few colors. This created what is now known as "posterization." This style is something that can be recreated using Adobe Photoshop.

Students were shown how to create this look in Adobe Photoshop. They got to pick a color scheme based upon a feeling that they chose to communicate through their digital artwork. Students had self-portrait photographs done of themselves. Opening these photographs up in Adobe Photoshop, the students then altered their images by limiting their color palette to fit into the color scheme they had chosen.

In the process students created a one of a kind expressive self-portrait simply due to their color choices. They also gained a new understanding of how digital technology is just another art medium, as well students learned how they can influence how a person might view them based upon their color scheme.

So that is the what this digital art lesson was about and how we were able to get these really cool digital art pieces from our kiddos. It was a lot of fun and also great to hear that they ended up using the skills as well they learned in Photoshop to manipulate images for a Glogster they did in English on a separate assignment. So it's fun to see them utilize this that way.

Comment by MARTIN COCKRAM on February 3, 2012 at 3:04pm

These are great - reveal your secrets, please!!!

Comment by kendra Farrell on February 3, 2012 at 1:52am

Vanessa I love these!! Do you have a lesson handout that you could share? kendra