Self-portrait comic strips, inspired by Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein. Art for the cover of the April 1966 issue of Newsweek.
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Roy Lichtenstein. In the Car. 1963.
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Roy Lichtenstein was "an American pop artist best known for his boldly-colored parodies of comic strips and advertisements." His style is universally recognized, and has influenced visual culture for decades. Click here for a full bio on this renegade artist.
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Mrs. T's example, featuring her daughter.
This project was an adventure in Adobe Illustrator. Students improved the skills they learned in Graphic Design 1, and learned many new Adobe Illustrator techniques. Here is how we created our comic strips:
Here are some outstanding projects created by my students:
- We each chose an onomatopoeia word, typeset in a comic-style font, and styled it using a Warp Effect (mandatory) and perhaps a 3D Effect (optional).
- To enhance the word art, we created shapes and applied various Distort/Transform effects to them.
- Using our onomatopoeia word as a springboard, we used a storyboard worksheet to concept/sketch a three-scene comic strip that dramatizes a mundane moment in life.
- We limited ourselves to colors within Illustrator's "Pop Art" swatches palette, and kept a consistency/unity of our chosen colors from scene to scene.
- We learned about Ben-day dots, then created our own custom dot and stripe patterns. Each of us created at least one dot-pattern swatch and at least one stripe-pattern swatch, which we saved in our Swatches palette, and used thoughtfully throughout our entire project.
- We took photographs of ourselves and other people (if necessary), uploaded them, and placed them into our Illustrator documents to trace. We also downloaded any necessary supporting images from the Internet.
- All people and objects appearing in our project were traced with the Pen tool, and given solid fills of Pop Art colors and/or fills of stripe or dot patterns.
- Every person and object in our project was given a black stroke that is non-uniform and has a hand-inked appearance. This was achieved by creating our own brush and using that(those) brush(es) as strokes throughout our project.
- All dialogue and/or thinking by the characters in our scene appear in appropriate speech bubbles, with the text set in a comic-style font.
- We made sure the people, objects, actions, and dialogue featured throughout the project were thoughtfully chosen and were clearly inspired by the onomatopoeia word. Before proceeding, we looked at our three Illustrator files as a whole to ensure entire scene makes sense and flows logically.
- We exported our finished Illustrator files and put our comic strip together in Photoshop, using a template Mrs. T supplied.
Here are some outstanding projects created by my students: