Andy Warhol

Our Andy Warhol unit contains lessons inspired by some of his most notable artworks, including his scratch art flower images, ice-cream printmaking artworks and his depiction of animals using pop art colours and thick outlines. Students will use a range of skills and techniques to create artworks that emulate the style of this renowned artist.

Within the K-2 category, students will create a scratch art and collage interpretation of Warhol’s famous flower artworks, and then will learn to create their own stamps to facilitate a printmaking artwork of ice cream in a waffle cone. In the flower artwork, students will use black acrylic paint to make their own scratch art paper, and then use the elements of line, repetition, pattern and style to compose a scratchy background emulating the reference artworks. Students will then use collage and drawing techniques to add some brightly coloured flowers to complete the artwork. In the ice cream cone artwork, students will create their own foam stamps to print ice cream scoops and then finish the artwork with a collaged waffle cone. These lessons give students the opportunity to expand their compositional skills, as well as their understanding of colour, line, and pattern creation through repetition and overlapping.

Within the 3-4 year category, students will complete an acrylic painting on canvas of either a cat or a dog, using non-representational colours and thick outlines to emulate Andy Warhol’s pop-art style. This lesson will allow students to expand on their knowledge of paint application skills and techniques, including the addition of shadows, highlights, and contrast in an artwork, the use of different colour palettes and their effects on the viewer, and use of an outline as a stylistic choice for an artwork. This lesson will focus on the elements of space, shape, line, and colour, so that students can successfully emulate the printmaking style of Andy Warhol.

In the 5-6 year category, students will analyse Andy Warhol’s “endangered animals” series of artworks in order to produce their own brightly coloured pop-art artwork of an endangered animal of their choosing using acrylic painting techniques. Students will learn how to create a representational sketch from a reference image, and then using the elements of colour and line will expand upon their sketches to create a loose outline of their chosen animal, using contour lines similar to those of Andy Warhol. The animals will be completed with brightly coloured paint, imploring students to think about the direction of light in their image, and to input highlights, shadows, and contrasts as necessary using non-representational colour schemes. Students will analyse their use of colour and learn about different kinds of colour palettes and their effect on the viewer. Students will make concrete decisions about their colour choice and composition to create an image that emulates the work of Andy Warhol and many other pop artists.