Andy Warhol – Primary School Art

A great lesson to do in a unit on pets. We used Andy Warhol’s ’25 Cats’ as inspiration for these drawings of cats in all sorts of positions. Before Warhol was well known, he published a book with lots of illustrations of cats. Warhol was living with his Mum in New York and at one time he had 25 cats cohabiting in the apartment!!

LESSON ACTIVITIES:

View video about Andy Warhol’s “25 cats” and look at his pictures.

What do you see? What else do you notice about the pictures? What do you think he used to draw and colour the pictures? (eg. black outline in ink, not all realistic colours.)

Students followed some directed drawing (and some youtube tutorials) of cats in different positions. (in greylead pencil) to fit four differnt cats on their paper.

They then used a fine point waterproof marker (like Sharpie), added short lines to add texture for the cat’s fur, then & different coloured food dye wash colour on each cat.

FULL LESSON with learning intentions, success criteria, Victorian curriculum links, youtube video links used to draw cats in different positions, and assessment/self evaluation rubric.

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These examples were very well done ipad /digital art in the style of Andy Warhol made by Year 3-4 students. We used the Brushes Redux free app on ipads.

Firstly students choose an everyday popular food item, and save a screen shot on their ipad camera roll. When you open the Brushes App you begin by clicking the + icon in the top right to create a “new painting” by choosing the appropriate size and orientation (portrait or landscape) I always tell them to choose the largest size as it’s easiest to work on.

Click the image/photo icon in the middle right to choose a photo from the camera roll. The image can be “pinched out” to make it fit the size of the “painting”. Click “Accept”

Separate layers are used to trace and then colour the image. You have to make sure the layer you are drawing on is highlighted in blue. The outline layer can be dragged to on top of the colouring in layer (as in the examples where different colours are used for the item as seen in the Twirl bar and below in the Crunchie bar and Dairy Milk chocolate bar.

Next I added 4 different coloured backgrounds on 4 separate layers. If the whole jar was coloured in, including the white areas, I could have just used the setting “Fill Layer” but that would show through on the areas I left uncoloured.