take yourself off to old London town for a day and go to the Tate Gallery. Look at what's there then think about which approach you'd prefer.

a lot involves use of large areas of flat primary colours and collage, normally utilising consumer imagery and popular icons. Printing is a very popular medium for Pop Art.

also while you're in Londinium Colonia Agrippina, take yourself over to Carnaby street, that gives you a good flavour of the spectrum of Pop Art (particularly the pavement)

and speak to grom, he's a Pop Art boy. I'm more International Style/Modern Movement really.

..everyone suffers in silence with burdens, the man who drives minicabs down in Old Compton; the Asian man, with his love-hate affair with this racist lying town..

im looking for stuff i can find on teh net and slap on the side of a big orange truck, but your suggestion is also good

@ff,

On the net, look up Andy Warhol (and/or Andy Warhol posters), for example. He's kind of like a pretty easy target to hit for examples of Pop Art.

Taw and Grom will immediately jump in and dump a lot more names on you but if you're googling, it is a good way to get started and to get your bearings.

AND, of course, google up on POP ART. You'll find lots of references on the subject.

Was that Jackson Pollock guy considered pop art? If you were trying to imitate him just get a monkey and give it a paintbrush.

Let's get those missiles ready to destroy the universe!!

no he's Abstract Expressionist

..everyone suffers in silence with burdens, the man who drives minicabs down in Old Compton; the Asian man, with his love-hate affair with this racist lying town..

Funny thing Pop Art. Looks easy doesn't it?!....it really isn't! Taw and Indy are right - scout the net and get yourself to the Tate in London to find out what it is you like. I imagine that if you don't know Pop Art too well, you're probably thinking of either Warhol or Lichtenstein Comic Art.

Don't even attempt Lichtenstein. Full Stop. Not unless, of course, you are a superb comic artist with a few years to kill and an eye for surrealism.

The easiest style to replicate is Warhol's screenprinting stage - things like "marilyn" and "campbells soup". The only way to make it look really good is to actually do a screenprint....but if you have no idea what that is then I don't recommend you DON'T attempt it without attending an art class first. Its bloody hard! But I would recommend you give it a go if you can find a class - its quite good fun. There are however, ways of tackling that sort of thing with photoshop. They don't always look as good as they should, in fact, they never do - but its a quicker and easier solution. There are tutorials on the net if you scout for them. Don't forget to work in CMYK and cm/pts if you are working to print!

cool i'll give it a go

Actually screen printing isn't exactly easy either. I studied it for approx 6 months in my senior year and never made a decent go of it. I always had running or blotchy colours. I never did like screen printing though, always seemed a bit to mechanical for my tastes.

" I always had running or blotchy colours."

you just weren't trying hard enough, prob rushing your screen-block. I used to take weeks doing my screens before I even used them. In fact sometimes I did the screen then never used it cos I was bored by then and knew what the dam thing would look like anyway.

.."Give in to lust,
Give up to lust, oh heaven knows we'll Soon be dust"..

Indeed it is a bloody long, painful, drawn out process if you do it correctly....that's why I appreciate Lichtenstein's work a lot more nowadays, knowing that he screenprinted quite a lot of it. The man was a genius.

Which takes us back to one of Taw's posts... kind of sort of.

So there are two main components to creating works of art.

The technical skill and the creative mind. Are all the great artists
equally endowed in each or does it vary from artist to artist?

it varies of course. most artists have a natural talent which gets them by and vcan be q wonderful, but without the tempering of some degree of technical training it rarely attains its true potential. There are the rare prodigies who appear to already have the skills and the work just flows out of them, but in reality there isn't a artist-prodigy who hasn't benefited from training and learning from the experience of his predecessors.

however no amount of technical familiarity will replace a lack of talent. you get a lot of people who think theyre good at art because they can copy photographs and record covers, draw chocolate box scenes etc, but give them a life-model to draw and you invariably get a horrible mess.

.."Give in to lust,
Give up to lust, oh heaven knows we'll Soon be dust"..

never a truer word spoken....however, it could be argued that a popartist doesn't need to be able to create a life drawing - as its not his style at all. In fact, cubists, surrealists and even some impressionists may have not been capable of doing that....so are they artists or not??

I'm with you completely on the technical aspect though...100%...talent will only get you so far, you must learn the skills before you can truly achieve your potential. Its like taking an autistic mathematical genius and asking them to do a square root calculation - without first explaining what a square root is - they would be more than capable of doing it, they just don't know what it is. Same applies with artists.

Then lets take some real classical artists as examples and indulge me if you will and rate them for technical skill and creative genius on scales of 1 to 10 with the higher number denoting greater ability:

Leonardo Da Vinci
Raphael
Hieronymus Bosch
Vermeer
Titian
Reubens

<Edit>

Let's try to set a reference point. Let's say ONLY for the sake of comparitive scale that Rembrandt is an 8 for technical skill and an 8 for creative genius.


Edited by - Indy11 on 6/11/2004 7:07:01 AM