Art at Hosmer: Pop Art Inspired Onomatopoeia Design

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Pop Art Inspired Onomatopoeia Design

To start off the year, 3rd grade artists looked at and discussed the work of Roy Lichtenstein and learned about his use of onomatopoeia, which is when a word imitates the sound of the object or action it refers to. Some examples are words like: "wham," "drip," and "ka-pow!"

Robert Lichtenstein, Whaam (1963)

We noticed that Lichtenstein was inspired by comics since the use of onomatopoeia is more common in comics and cartoons. We also noticed that he used primary colors in these paintings. We began our own artwork by brainstorming a list of onomatopoeia words as a class.

Each student selected 4 different words and drew sketches that demonstrated the word's action and meaning as a visual picture, combining letters and pictures. 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.

We selected one brainstorm sketch to make into a larger drawing. First we sketched out our design, working hard to make it larger and expand our idea to fit the space. Then we outlined with Sharpie marker and used markers in primary colors, incorporating the benday dots in at least one area of our artwork.

Students thought carefully about where they were using certain colors and some students overlapped their benday dots to create the illusion of a secondary color.

After students were finished, they did a turn and talk using their fortune tellers to share their work with a partner. The fortune tellers contain questions about your artwork and help students share what they are most proud of, what was the most challenging part of the project, etc. with each other. These are some examples of our finished Roy Lichtenstein inspired onomatopoeia designs: