Roy Lichtenstein ‘Pop’ Artist

Roy Lichtenstein used comic strip artwork to create his large-scale paintings. Lichtenstein became famous for copying these images, and enlarging and simplifying them. By taking these comic strip drawings and enlarging them, he ensured a far wider audience could access the work of the comic artist – the paintings looked quite different on such a large scale.

Lichtenstein used bold colours, and lines to represent tone. This helped him to create unique works of art, which very quickly appealed a worldwide audience.

Lichtenstein also made great use of ‘ben day dots’ – a technique used in the newspaper printing process. By recreating these in paint, he was able to create large areas of colour and tone with ease. Small coloured dots are closely spaced, widely spaced or overlapping. Magenta dots, for example, are widely spaced to create pink. Comic books of the 1950s and 1960s used Ben-Day dots in the four process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to inexpensively create shading and secondary colors such as green, purple, orange and flesh tones. Magentacyan, magenta, yellow and blackshadingsecondary colors