Roy Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923 in New York city to fairly ideal upper middle class family. As a young man, he went to private school, loved Jazz and took summer art classes. He enlisted when WWII began and served as a draftsman and artist. After the war, he earned a Master of Fine Arts from Ohio State and had his first solo exhibition soon after. He settled into a professorship at Rutgers and experimented with Expressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Impressionism.

One afternoon, his son was looking at a Mickey Mouse comic book and said “I bet you can’t paint as good as that, eh, Dad?” Roy took the challenge, producing a piece called “Look Mickey”. He loved the style and began producing paintings with hard lines and the Ben-Day style dots used in comic books. In 1961, he showed the pieces and all were purchased before the showing opened. His work was instantly popular world-wide and also highly criticized as being a shallow copy. Time magazine even labeled him the “Worst Artist Ever”. However, Lichtenstein didn’t take himself or the criticism too seriously. He said “I am nominally copying, but I am really restating the copied thing in other terms. In doing that, the original acquires a totally different texture.” Lichtenstein was part of the “Pop Art” movement, which took images from advertising and everyday objects and elevated them into fine art. Often with a heavy dose or humor and irony.

As he matured, he applied his same techniques to sculpture, creating ceramics that had a surreally 2 dimensional feel. Some of these works were done on a huge scale for municipal projects. In the 1990s, he began a series of 60 paintings that applied his stylized approach to famous paintings from Van Gogh to Degas and were shown side by side with a print of the original work. He died of pneumonia in 1997 at age 74.

Today we will create our own pop culture comic style pictures.

Use the rulers to draw as many frames as you want on the paper to tell the story.
Pencil in the details. Make it one interesting moment or tell a larger story.
Outline everything with a sharpie and fill in with the markers. You can use solid color or Ben-Day dots to provide some shading or texture.