Roy Lichtenstein was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement. He drew from American pop culture, specifically comic books, graphic works and advertisements, to create his style of art.

Lichtenstein was particularly interested in comic strips. He borrowed images directly from comics and modified the Ben-Day dots that are used to create color in comic books, into his own paintings. Ben-Day dots are overlapping dots of multi-colors. They are an inexpensive printing method used in comic books to trick the eye into thinking it sees one color.

TCA eighth graders looked at Lichtenstein’s prints of people. They noticed that they are often large, taking up most of the frame and expanding off the edge of the paper. They are also frequently featured with a speech or thought bubble and they of course feature Lichtenstein’s famous dots. The students tried to incorporate all these aspects into self portraits.

The girls either took selfies or had their photo taken and then printed those images on a full page. They placed laminate over the photos and traced the lines of their face and body using a thick black sharpie. By just focusing on the basic structure of their features, and not the details, the image on the laminate was a simplified, almost cartoon, version of their faces.

Then, the students used a lighted background to transfer these laminate images onto paper. They painted their self portraits by adding bold colors to each space on the paper. These were finished off with a black outline and dots wherever they chose.