Abraham Lincoln Pop Art
INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT
This project was a side project that I was doing at home trying to learn new and different art styles, movements and techniques. I learnt a lot about different art styles in ATAR Visual Art and Cert III Visual Art at school and this inspired me to want to continue this through to home and create even more pieces. For this piece I chose Abraham Lincoln because I wanted my first try at pop art to be an important person of history who is very easily recognisable.
CONTENTS OF THIS PROJECT
RESEARCH
The first step of creating this project was researching different images of Abraham Lincoln and choosing the best one that had the right amount of details for me to work with and wouldn't be too blurry when I was transferring the image over to the canvas. After the right image was chosen I transferred it into drawing iPad application, Procreate, and began to trace over it to create a pop art style silhouette using the shadows and highlights of the image.
PROGRESS OF PROJECT
When scrolling through Pinterest during my free time I had found some different techniques that I wanted to try and I implemented one of them into the process of this project. Usually when I do paintings or realistic portraits I use a grid to transfer the image onto the material that I have chosen to work with and begin the artwork. However, the technique that I had seen on Pinterest was creating your own projector using a magnifying glass and your mobile phone device. I thought this would be a really cool and much faster way to transfer the image on to the canvas as opposed to the process I usually used and get out of my comfort zone by trying a new one.
Once buying the materials I needed for this technique, I set my magnifying glass up on top of boxes and books to the height that would be the right fit for projecting onto the canvas. Once figuring out this height I set up my phone on another stack of boxes a the same height just behind the magnifying glass. I positioned them together to display the image from the phone through the magnifying glass and onto the canvas I was using. Much like how a projector works with focusing resizing the image, I had to experiment with how close the phone was to the magnifying glass and the angle that the magnifying glass was on to adjust the image to the right size and definition.
CHALLENGES I FACED AND HOW I WORKED THROUGH THEM
There are bound to be new challenges when learning new techniques and this project definitely wasn't any exception. Although I was surprised with how well the DIY projector worked, and I was super excited to use it, it was hard to adjust the sharpness of the image being produced like you would with an actual projector. This made it a bit harder to see the image whilst I was tracing it but as the image was solely only two colours and the contrast was so high between them it helped me a bit with transferring the blurry image to the canvas. I don't think I would use this technique on a regular basis or for more advanced images with multiple colours and small details such as a landscape, as it would be really difficult to adjust the sharpness enough to be able to see what is in the image correctly. I was also knew to the pop art style so I found it hard to identify which areas would have to be negative or positive space in the composition to best draw out the details of Lincoln. Due to this, there are parts of his ear missing and the lack of reflection in his eyes makes for a creepier vibe than intended in the artwork. However, I really enjoyed this project and pushing myself to try new techniques and art style to create something interesting.
FINAL ARTWORK
