Piece 2 - The Andy Warhol silk screen effect

Warhol was the evil genius of the 1960’s art world:

"In August 62 I started doing silk-screens. I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly line effect. With silk-screening you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face the first Marilyn’s"

Marilyn, a beloved screen icon conveniently commits suicide and Warhol exploits her death for personal gain = Evil & Genius

I began with a photo I captured using my mobile phone and conituned by using Photoshop and experimented with its various settings for my art piece. I started by going to the Channels panel and clicked on the RBG composite, I then created for myself an Alpha channel. I played around with different functions and pushed up the contrast levels and experimented with my values until I achieved harsh contrast levels.

Using the brush tool I took away all the harsh lines that didn’t contribute to the photo and inverted the mask, switched palettes, made a new layer and filled the selection with the desired colour.

I again made another layer, selected a region and used the lasso tool to fill it with a colour. I continued playing around with various tools, colours and when I was happy I synced all my work together.

I began with a photograph I took from my mobile phone of a few stools I saw on Degraves Street. I was excited when I saw all the chairs aligned together because it reflected on repetition beautifully! I saved the image onto my Mac hard-drive so was unable to load it onto my laptop but this is a photograph that i found - this image is a photo of the orginal that i wook off the computer to show a friend the progress of my work





















I was especially inspired by Warhol's piece Che, 1962 - so my colours that i have used are very similar to his.

Here are just examples of a few compositions that i created. I will post a photo of my finished product when i align and finish composing them.








This is my completed piece. In the beginning I printed a whole batch of these photographs using a matte finish. This took away all the fine detail so i re-printed them all again but this time in gloss. These photographs are repeated in a diagonal pattern and are placed on masonite and covered with a clear piece of plastic.





A close up: