What Would Roy Lichtenstein Do?

Roy Lichenstein was one of the founders of what came to be called 'Pop Art'. Which attempted not to rise above or exist beyond what was, or even to capture a moment in time. Pop art was the spirit of reveling in and glorifying the inane, repetitive, mechanical, overly commercialized, cookie-cutter world the 20th Century had become. His particular eye was drawn toward the medium of the American comic book. The art form and reproduction method that drove it fascinated him beyond a normal obsession. He would spend his days scanning the pages of comic book after comic book looking for just the right 'moment' that captured his imagination; then he took that moment, drew and redrew it, removing and adding elements and composing it just right. Then he would take this final composition and project it onto his canvas and painstakingly 'ink' it with his brushes and apply the skin and various tones using a toothbrush and special metal screens he had made for just that purpose to simulate the simple four color printing process of the time.

So...when I was surfing the web to find more cover images to add to my Nick Cardy (Google him..it's worth it) Win 7 background slide show, I came upon the cover of Falling In Love #137 and it struck me: What would Roy Lichtenstein do with this image? Below are the original section of the cover I chose to work with, and the two 'takes' I have chosen for the moment. There are about a dozen filters that have been applied and removed, with different layers made invisible to see what effect could be achieved only using parts of an applied filter, along with the clone tool (which is no big secret, as you will see), and several level adjustments to either the whole image or just parts.

I almost felt like Roy Lichtenstein himself for awhile, only he had true vision and ability, where as I can merely attempt to mimic his greatness using other people's electronically applied mathematical variations.

It was a lot of fun though!

Really like Lichtenstein's artwork for sure; even toyed with emulating that look but never got to the point where I said to myself, I nailed it. lol

I'll believe that! Their can only ever be one Lichtenstein. So much so that when Warhol thought about showing his cartoon-based enlarged works, and saw the level to which Lichtenstein had taken the art form already, independent of him, he ditched it.