Onomatopoeia!

3rd grade artists looked at the work of Roy Lichtenstein and learned about the use of onomatopoeia -- which is a really long word! Onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound of the object or action it refers to. Some examples are words like: "ouch," "achoo" and "ka-boom!"

We looked at a few of Lichtenstein's paintings and shared our observations. We noticed that he had a comic or cartoon-style to his artwork and he mainly used the 3 primary colors: red, yellow and blue. He also used words like "Whaam!" and "Varoom!" to show action.  

Roy Lichtenstein, Varoom! (1963)

We brainstormed some onomatopoeia words as a class, and then did 4 sketches of ideas where we took the word and expressed it as a visual, combining letters and pictures as part of our design:

During the next class, we looked at more of Lichtenstein's paintings and noticed that he used dots of color, called benday dots, which were inspired by the way comic books were printed at the time. 

Roy Lichtenstein, Sunrise (1965)

We selected one sketch to make into a larger drawing and used markers in primary colors, incorporating the benday dots in at least one area of our artwork. These are some examples of our finished onomatopoeia drawings:

Natalie, 3rd Grade

Tamsin, 3rd Grade

Lily, 3rd Grade

Cyrus, 3rd Grade