Digital Media Design FdA: Research: Pop Art!

The first thing I saw when I googled pop art was:

"Pop Art was the art of popular culture. It was the visual art movement that characterised a sense of optimism during the post war consumer boom of the 1950's and 1960's."

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/pop_art.htm

The two most common names I came across when searching for pop art were Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Andy Warhol in particular is someone named quite often as someone who "personified" Pop Art. He took images of popular things or people - such as a can of soup, or Marilyn Monroe - and turned it into a piece of art. With his famous "Marilyn" piece he used a variety of bold colours to strip the image of it's initial meaning (e.g. An image of Marilyn Monroe is important because of who she is). He did this because he felt things lost their meaning when they were made "popular". So, by using the same sorts of colours on all of his art and by making it all the same size etc he would make every piece of art he did have the same amount of meaning - one isn't better than the other purely based on what its of.

Roy Lichtenstein is another famous Pop Artist. He focused more on the "comic strip" style, and his work is very consistent. It all features bold, black outlines and uses the "halftone" technique to fill blocks of colour. The halftone technique is a series of dots placed relatively closely together to fill up a space, and then when viewed from a distance that space will appear some-what one solid colour.

Left column by Roy Lichtenstein, middle and right column by Andy Warhol

Main things I noticed about the Pop Art Style:

Bright, bold, contrasting colours. All of the colours used in the collage above contrast and stand out on their own, and no text (e.g. the 'Campbells' logo and 'Tomato Soup') is illegible.
Combination of around 3 colours in one piece, just used as different shades. Even though all of the colours are bold the art isn't hard to look at as there are only a few many colours (e.g. blue, red, white) and different shades of each are used to build the picture.
Blocks of colour - not really any shading, but blocks of black are used to represent it. You can see this in the hair of the woman on the phone (by Roy Lichtenstein, top left). The blocks of black are placed where there would actually be an effect of a shadow in a photo.
Main background is a solid colour - The 'Campbells Soup' piece (Andy Warhol) has a blue background, but that blue is still featured within the can of soup itself. Whereas the Cow piece (by Andy Warhol also), has a bright yellow background that totally contrasts the main image of cow that is a red/pink shade.
Thick black outlines that combined with the solid blocks of colour give the art a 'cartoon' look.

When I first saw that one of the design styles we needed to research was Pop Art, I knew where I was going to look first. I have a book called "Retro Graphic Design - Pocket Essentials" that contains all sorts of information on graphic design styles in a timeline style - from the 1880's to 1989, and one of the styles it covers is Pop Art.

Page 190, "Retro Graphic Design - Pocket Essentials"

The book talks about how Pop Art started out with collages in the Dada style - cut up images and existing advertisements arranged together to create photomontages - but then expanded into what we know and recognise as Pop Art today.