In the previous entry I directed you to a tutorial on how to create transparent line art in Photoshop.

There are other things you can do with this besides make cartoon characters. One project you can do with your students is create Andy Warhol style Pop Art self-portraits.

If you are looking to introduce an art lesson on Andy Warhol, The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA has some online teaching materials.

http://www.warhol.org/education/index.html

To make your life easy when preparing a lesson on Warhol, they even have some Power Point Presentations about Pop art and the life of Andy Warhol available for download.

Basically, the project is simple. After presenting students with a brief lesson on Andy Warhol and his art, the students can draw a self-portrait that they will scan and color in Photoshop using the transparent line art techniques we previously talked about.

However, Andy Warhol’s Pop art was partly about the repetition that comes with industrialization and mass production and many of his portrait pieces were repeated on the same canvas, or were part of a series of canvases. Many people remember his portraits of famous movie and rock stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Mick Jagger in bright silk screened colors:

Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn), 1967
Screen print on paper, 36 x 36 in.
Courtesy of the Andy Warhol Museum Collection

So, likewise, the students can create a series of self-portraits in many colors very easily by saving an uncolored copy of their line art, coloring the line art, saving it under a new name (to prevent saving over the original line art) and then starting a new one.

Once they have about four self-portrait color scheme variations, they can put the pictures together into one finished pop-art piece.

This is a really simple sample of a finished project. Older or more experienced students may want to do more with their portraits.  

The really nice thing about using Photoshop for this assignment is there is no risk involved. The students can experiment with different fill colors or even shading and other fill effects without fear of “botching” their art work. They can always undo, or use Photoshop’s “step backwards” option to erase mistakes or if they made a lot of errors, they can always “revert” to their last save. The only problem is they must make sure they do not save over their prototype line art!

Once the students scan and create their transparent line art it would be wise if they gave it an unmistakable name such as “Uncolored Transparent Line Art.psd” to keep them from accidentally saving over it! You may even consider making them save it in a different folder, or keep a separate “teacher” folder of their original scans to help avoid accidents!