Pop Art
These are two magazine pieces done in the Lichtenstein Pop art style. Creating Pop Art-style screen dots is a very simple process in Photoshop. 1. Firstly create a greyscale image. It can be flat grey or a gradient, a shaded picture, photograph, it doesn't matter. 2. Go to Image/Mode and convert to Bitmap/Halftone screen. 3. Set the frequency- the number you put in depends on the image's dimensions, dpi and also what sized dots you want. So just play around with it until you find the desired look. 4. Set the angle to 45 degrees and the shape to round, press OK...and there you have it.
For the pics above, I then coverted the dots to RGB, colourized them, then cut and pasted them into the black line work.
posted by Chris Wahl at 11:44 PM
14 Comments:
FAVOURITES! These are great!
I mean _particularly_ great. What were they for?
I sure wish there were more good romance comics around.
Thanks Stikman!
The first was for an article about spousal abuse, in Yen magazine. The second was for an article about relationships in The Weekend Australian's magazine supplement.
Fantastic Chris! I've always been a fan of the pop art style but never knew it was called "Lichtenstein" until you blogged about it now.
Thanks for the Photoshop tip/tutorial and I'll have to remember it next time if ever I wanted to try this style out! :)
Thanks Gary.
Yeah, his name was Roy Lichtenstein.
This may be a stupid question. How do colorize the dots once you convert them from bitmap to grayscale to RGB? What do you do to the dots after converting them to RGB?
Well, since the dots are pure black, no greys, you can just use the paint bucket (with 'contiguous' unchecked in the bucket options) fill one dot and all of the dots will be filed the same colour.
Another way is to go to Hue/Saturation, tick the colorize box, increase Lightness and Saturation, then move the Hue bar to choose your colour.
Hope that helps
Love the pop art stuff. Big fan of Lichtenstein. Been dabbling with doing some myself, and this sounds faaaar easier then what i've been trying. More effective too... thanks mate.
I'm glad I could help out.
I've used that dot technique for years, but always found the dots aren't quite round. And when you select the white out, they get even more jaggedy.
If I may... here's something I tried today, which worked nicely:
1) In Photoshop, make a 13px x 13px canvas
2) Make a new layer
3) Draw a circle using the ellipse tool, and make sure it's centre
4) Fill it black (or whatever colour you wish)
5) Go Edit > Define Pattern
6) Name it "Dots" or something, hit ok
7) Go to the area you want, or a whole new page/layer and hit Edit > Fill
8) Use "Pattern" instead of foreground colour.
*note - If you want bigger or small dots, you'll have to define a new pattern.
Now you have a layer of dots with no background, and nice and smooth. Just thought I'd add it in the pot.
I should add that it won't work for halftone gradients, so in those cases you'll have to go for the technique that Chris has generously provided. (What a great image, that battered bride is.)
Thanks for sharing your process Anton. I'll have to try that out.
Hello all....
It might be kind of old or off topic abit but I'd like to make some halftones. Getting bent on them being circular and in vector format. I came across http://vectorstock.com/gallery/1078/ that has a few vector halftones that are clean. How the heck was that done?? I've tried using photoshop but I need to get them into vector format. Being a signmaker, I need to cut them on a vinyl plotter. We recently had a customer that wanted to wrap his scion xb with them and unfortunately I couldnt make it happen.
I need help..... Im cross-eyed and cant sleep over these dopey dots. :D
Thanks all.
Hi Ted
One way I can think of doing it would be to buy a bitmap to vector plugin for Illustrator. The current Illustrator CS3 has one built in, there's also Adobe Streamline and one I use called Silhouette.
So, you would create the halftones in Photoshop at hi-res (600 dpi) then vectorize them in Illustrator.
Hope that helps.
-Chris Wahl
Thanks for the Reply Chris....
odd has it... Streamline traces better than CS3's Trace for what I wanted it to do... but... still not what Im getting after. LOL, I can no longer go on with this. Someday there will be that plugin that solves this mystery. I lost alot of time seeking an answer and for now, I dont think it will be there. Just going to take a good break from it and de-cross my eyes. Sorta feeling like Bugs Bunny in that one cartoon where he sees dots everywhere.
Thanks again
-T
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