Just over a week ago I hosted another art session. We continued the Pop Art theme to look at the work of Roy Lichtenstein.
Why Roy Lichtenstein?
I love Lichtenstein’s work and I think, for children, it is particularly engaging and a lot of fun. I also wanted to look at another Pop Artist, but one who’s style was very different to Andy Warhol.
Materials Needed
For this session I provided each child with a range of printouts should they wish to make their own pack of information.
- Famous Artist Research Brochure (from TpT)
- Famous Artist Colouring Pages (from TpT)
- Famous Artist Paper Dolls (From TpT)
- A4 tracing paper
- Black sharpie
Parents were also asked to print an A4 out an A4 black and white image of their children for the activity.
How I ran the Session
First of all we recapped a little about Andy Warhol and his work and how it was known as Pop Art. I then talked to the children about Roy Lichtenstein, His childhood and his time in Europe during the war and his return to the USA.
I then explained a little about this art, showing them his parody piece of Mona Lisa before talking about how he used onomatopoeia to create his PopArt Words. At this stage, we broke for the first activity which I detail below.
Next I talked to the children about the use of panels from Cartoons and told the children the story of the famous panel that inspired Whaam. I showed them the original panel from the All American Men of War comic from 1962 and explained the story up until this point before showing them the panel. We then looked at Lichtenstein’s Whaam and discussed whether we thought it was sufficiently different.
I then covered the Ben Day Dots system that Lichtenstein is famed for using in his artwork before showing some more of Lichtenstein’s more famous works.
Pop-Art Activity
We completed two activities for this Pop Art Session. The first one was to choose a word to decorate Pop Art style (Or their initial) It was interesting the words that were chosen and they looked great when the children were working on them to make them into Lichtenstein’s style.
The second activity was to make themselves into a Lichtenstein style piece of Art. The children were encouraged to use the same photo as last time around. They traced over the main outline of themselves using a black sharpie and then to colour it using the same colours that Lichtenstein used and to use the Ben Day Doy system where they wanted.
This was a LOT of fun and it was brilliant to see how great the works of art turned out. It’s very effective and easy to do and really helped to show the style of work.
Follow up with my own children
With my own children, we have followed this up by adding to our artist project book and adding Lichtenstein to the world map we are building. We talked again about Lichtensteins work and talked about which works we liked the most and compared their own works of art from Andy Warhol and Lichtenstein.
Other artist studies can be found below.
this all sounds like as much fun as it was educational – top work (again)