If you were born after the 70s you may not be at all familiar with Andy Warhol’s art. Andy Warhol is probably the most famous figure in Pop Art. In fact, one art critic once called Warhol “the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced”. Warhol was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement and is considered one of the most important American artists of the second half of the 20th century. In the 1960s Warhol created some of his most famous works; the “Marilyn Monroe” series’ Campbells Soup Cans (considered among the most famous Pop Art paintings of all time), and more.

Even though Warhol propelled Pop Art’s popularity in the 60s, it still lives on even today. Like most “old” trends, it tends to come & go in cycles. But it’s almost always around. In today’s society, Pop Art lives on in the form of Marvel movies, cartoons, and tattoo styles! Pop Art looked at art differently, not unlike how digital scrapbooking has looked at the scrapbooking hobby in a whole new way.

Many designers have been inspired by the bold colors and graphic elements of Pop Art and have incorporated these elements into their work. Pop Art is relatable & recognizable in our daily life. It uses bright colors and bold outlines to capture the viewer’s eye.

Today I’m going to take you on a little journey into the world of Pop Art…

Pop Art Effect

While there is a Pop Art Guided option in Photoshop Elements (PSE), it is rather limited and doesn’t give you any options as far as using multiple colors on different parts of a photo. You can get to the Pop Art Effect by switching to Guided Mode & selecting Fun Edits. You may have to scroll down a bit or you can just search for Pop Art:

I created the sample Pop Art image above using this photo of Judy Garland from a public domain site:

What I ended up with (shown at the top of this section) is nowhere near what I think of as Pop Art. But I grew up in the Pop Art era so I may have a different expectation. That doesn’t mean you can’t give it a try for yourself.

Today I’m going to show you how to manually create a look much more similar to a “Warhol”.

I’ll be using a filter, layers and blend modes to build up the effect, making it easy to correct mistakes or change the look at a later stage.

Art fact…the image directly above is one of Andy Warhol’s iconic prints of Marilyn Monroe. He used Marilyn Monroe’s image in many of his Pop Art works after her death.

First a quick reminder. I use the current version of PSE – 2024. So, everything I show you was accomplished using that software. Some of my screen shots may look different than what you see on your screen depending on the version you are using. If you don’t use PSE, please search the internet for other tips/tutorials specific to the graphics editing software that you use.

I’m going to be using this photo of Marilyn Monroe I found on a public domain website:

I’ve pulled this photo into a blank 12 x 12 file. The first thing I need to do is duplicate the photo (just as a precaution) and hide the original. Next, I need to cut her away from the background. I have the option in PSE 2024 to select the background by going to the top tool bar and clicking Select-> Background.

Next, I want to invert the selection so I end up with the subject as the selection. I then go to the top tool bar and click Select-> Inverse I could then simply delete the background from the image. But I’m not going to do that just yet.

Note: If you don’t have that option all you have to do is use the Lasso tool from the toolbox & draw around the subject in your photo to create a selection. If you need a refresher on how to make a good selection see my prior post about making selections.

In either case, the outline doesn’t need to be too precise, as long as it follows the face and hair in the original. The goal is to have the entire subject selected like this:

I need to remove the detail of the face for the effect to work properly. With the marching ants still around the selection I go to the Filter menu and click Filter-> Adjustments-> Threshold. This filter looks at the tones of an image; anything lighter than mid-gray is made white, anything darker than mid-grey is made black:

The initial effect (at least for me) is too strong and has a little too much white that I need to balance out:

All I have to do is click the slider and start to drag it to the right (or left depending on your image). The black areas begin to increase (or disappear depending on your image) to be replaced by white. A value of around 145 worked well for me:

Notice how the background didn’t change. With only the subject isolated (selected) the adjustment filter was only applied to the selection!

In order to follow the steps required to achieve the final Pop Art look I need to copy this selection (with the filter applied) to a new layer. So, I go to the top tool bar and select Layer-> New-> Layer Via Copy. I name this new layer “CutOut”. I can now hide the duplicate (adjusted) copy of the photo as I’ll be working only with the CutOut layer for the next few steps.

Now I can start to add some color to the image. First, I’ll bring back the selection area of the cutout by pressing Ctrl-Click on the CutOut layer’s thumbnail. The “marching ants” outline will appear around the edge of the image.

Then I go to Layer-> New-> Layer. A dialog box will appear:

When working on a technique like this that will involve multiple layers for different colors, it’s always useful to name the layers. This one will be for the skin color so I’ll name it “SkinTone”. I don’t worry about any other settings for now. I click OK to create the layer. It appears in the Layers panel but I don’t see any change as yet.

Next, I’m going to change my foreground color chip to an exaggerated skin tone color. Skin tones are found somewhere between red and orange so I drag the arrows down on the Hue bar & pick a suitable shade from the main window. I ended up with a deep peachy color:

I then click OK to set the color. Next, I go to the Edit menu and select Fill Selection. When the Fill Layer dialog box appears the default for Use: is White (at least for me) so I click the down arrow to the left of the word White and select Foreground color:

I then click OK in the Fill Layer dialog box to fill the selection. I’ve now filled the layer with color but there’s a bit of a problem, I can’t see anything else! This is because the color layer is on top of the CutOut layer:

I can fix this by changing the layer’s Blend Mode. If you read my prior post with More Blending tips, you should already be aware of how these modes work. In this case I’m going to use Multiply. This mode only affects areas that are lighter than the current layer and as the layer below is black and white, the black areas are ignored so the color only applies to the white areas:

Note: Please notice that even though I created a new layer the “selection” around the CutOut layer is still active. It is very important that his selection remains active throughout most of the remaining steps. If for some reason it becomes deselected I can always just Ctrl+Click on the CutOut layer’s thumbnail to restore the selection.

The next step is to add the detail colors. I could do this on the SkinTone layer but it would be difficult to correct any mistakes so I’ll do this on a new layer above the SkinTone layer. I’m going to start with the hair, so I’ll name this new layer “Hair”. Again, I want the colors to show through to the original so I can set the blend mode to Soft Light in the dialog box before I create it (I can change this later if needed):

I then click OK to confirm and the new Hair layer is created. Now I select the Brush tool from the Toolbox. I want the detail to have a hard edge in the Brush settings. Because my image is fairly large, I select the Hard Round 60 pixels preset to start.

I change the foreground color chip to a vibrant yellow (#fed702) and click OK.

I simply paint over the area of the hair. Because I set the blend mode to Soft Light, the new color is only covering the skin tone, leaving the black detail intact. Don’t worry about going over the edges; the selection prevents anything spilling out. And I don’t have to worry too much about being overly accurate around the hairline, Warhol’s original is in block color and has a very hard edge.

You’ll notice the yellow appears slightly different to the actual color I chose. This is because it’s mixing with the skin tone as well as a result of creating this layer with a Blend Mode of Soft Light.

With the hair finished I can add the other details. I’m keeping all the detail painting on their own layer in case I need to go in and adjust blending later. I again create a new layer, this time naming it “Lips” with a Blend Mode of Multiply.

I’ll change the foreground color chip this time selecting a deep red (#b42229). I’ll reduce the size of the brush & paint over the top of the lips. Even though the current Blend Mode is Multiply, I’m going to paint over all of the lips including the black parts (using the original photo as a reference as to what areas of the black should actually be red) just in case I need to change the Blend Mode for a different effect.

I zoomed in pretty close so you could see the lips better. I’m not 100% happy with how the lips are showing up so I’m going to experiment with Blend Modes until I find something a bit more vibrant. Color Burn was a bit better but I ended up deciding on Hard Light:

I definitely like this better! Now onto the eyes, I realize we can’t see much of her actual eye but I’m going to play make-up artist here and give her some blue eye shadow 😉 So, I again create a new layer, this time naming it “Eyes” with a blend mode of Multiply.

I’ll change the foreground color chip this time selecting a bright blue (#2259b4) and paint in the eye-shadow:

That eyeshadow looks a bit too dark. So just as with the lips I’m going to play with the Blend Mode on this layer. Darken, Darker Color, Hard Light, Linear Light & Hard Mix were all better. But of those I found Hard Light also to be my favorite in this case:

Not too bad, right? But I think there’s still some more I can do here.

In the Warhol original, the white areas (teeth) were left as white. In the photo I used, there are some other “original” areas that I’d like to be white. In order to do that I’ll need to do things a bit differently.

Creating another new layer and painting with white is certainly an option. But there’s an even easier way to do this. Instead, I’ll activate the SkinTone layer and select the Eraser tool. Using a small brush tip, I erase the areas that I want to be white. Basically, all I’m doing is letting the original black and white (CutOut) layer show through.

You can see that I did the teeth and the collar of her dress. What you might not be able to see is I also hit the areas that would be the “sparkle” in her earrings.

We’re almost done. All that remains is to create a new backdrop for the image. I’ll need to remove the selection first, so I can either go to the top tool bar and click Select-> Deselect or press ESC or Ctrl+D.

Then I Ctrl+Click on the original (hidden) photo layer’s thumbnail. This creates a selection the same size as that original photo:

Now I create a new layer naming it “BackgroundFill”. This new layer initially appears above the SkinTone layer. I need to move this BackgroundFill layer beneath all the other layers I’ve created. With the BackgroundFill layer active I first change my foreground color chip to a suitable color for the background. I kind of like the background in the Warhol print so I’m going to go with that color (#8ccabf). I can then just use the Paint Bucket tool to fill the new BackgroundFill layer:

Not a Warhol, but I’m pretty happy with the result. I know we only played with one actual Filter but I thought this was still a fun way to show you how layers & Blend Modes can work in conjunction with Filters. I hope you enjoyed this little “Pop Art” lesson!

The final image can be cropped and saved however you choose for later use.

More Tips On Pop Art

Pop Art is one of the world’s largest art movements and is still used in design to this day. In its heyday, Pop Art was on the fringes of being political. Whether it was an endorsement or critique of capitalism, artists depicted the affluence and abundance of postwar society with imagery that celebrated materialism.

The second theme of Pop Art is the obsession with fame and celebrity culture – and surely little has changed today. Hollywood, movies, television, magazines, and newspapers were booming and as Andy Warhol declared, “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.”

Just as the artists of the Pop Art culture, we can borrow physically and aesthetically from visual sources such as television, magazines, and comic strips, to create works that incorporate magazine-like pages, or ones rendered like comic strips.

Pop Art is, in many cases, removed of emotion, and it does this by removing material from its context. For example, a banana painted as part of a fruit bowl in a still life is quite different from this oversized banana by Andy Warhol:

Objects can not only be removed from their context, but also combined with other objects or images to create other associations that play on a theme. Take a look at how Van Orten Design took this iconic photo from World War II VJ Day:

And then turned it into a piece of Pop Art for a Sisley department store window display:

Try using this kind of imagery to give a different look to a “teen themed” layout with normal photos also included!

The visual effect of Pop Art, whether it is collage or repetition, is created via the reproduction, overlay, and duplication of various images. Try using this type of combining images to reflect everyday life, to emphasize important elements in your layout.

Bright colors convey optimism and affluence, and Pop Art artists used primary colors and saturated neons to heighten the vivid effect. Keep that in mind whenever you work on a layout that you intend to convey optimism for your viewer. Don’t be shy about playing with colors to liven up your pop art designs.

Comic books greatly influenced a lot of Pop Art design. Today we see this look in comic themed scrapbooking kits. Try using these principles when working on layouts for kids with a comic book theme. I mean what kid doesn’t love Super Mario?

As always, if you have any questions or want to make a suggestion about a topic you’d like me to cover, please don’t ever hesitate to “Message Me”.

Thanks for reading this week’s Tuesday Tip. Be sure to check back next week for some fun tips on using PSE Filters on elements. If you want to stay informed about new posts, just click “Follow Me” to stay in touch. I hope you have a wonderful week!