This is my self portrait, which took me sometime to do due to my inexperience in the print room. I would have liked to have printed the colour behind straight onto the perspex, but I ended up doing the coloured images seperate and then sticking them behind the black images, certainly not the professional approach Andy Warhol would have used, but never mind I did get the effect I wanted in the end.

Andy Warhol

                                                   Art by Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987)

No other artist is as much identified with Pop Art as Andy Warhol. The media called him the Prince of Pop. Warhol made his way from a Pittsburgh working class family to an American legend.
Andy Warhol's Pop Art is both interesting and inspiring.  Although alot of his work was silk screen printmaking as opposed to painting, I do like his style.  The images resemble the posterised look, which is why I was probably drawn to them.  I like his creative style of repetition which he seemed to become obsessed with in his work and his clever use of colour to enhance his images.

We spent a short time in the print workshop at the beginning of our course exploring ideas of our own, although I found it quite daunting to begin with I soon became quite enthusiastic about what could be achieved.  I used Andy Warhol's work as my inspiation and did my own version of his self portrait 1978.

Choosing the right pictures for my paintings wasn't easy, I spent practically a whole day in Rounday Park with the kids last year, acting like David Bailey with my proper zoom-in digital SLR.  The kids were as accommodating as they could be I suppose, considering they were hating every minute of being together and were having to pose as if they genuinely liked each other.  In fact inbetween the tears, the fights and the shouting I was quite lucky to get such a  large collection together.
The picture of Lou and Freya was perfect for a portrait and the composition of the the two of them together was definitely worth painting.  The other two with Freya looking almost angelic and Lou looking very composed also seemed to be the ideal choice.
The baby is my nephew Haydn, which I painted for his christening last year.  Ideally, I would like to continue with this type of portraiture, I have tried to research other artists who may do something similar but I haven't found many.  Most create the image they want on photoshop and print it off, very few actually paint the image they have created.  I have used acrylic paints, but it would be interesting to pick up other painting techniques or ideas from artists who paint in a similar style.

This is my self portrait, painted in the same style, which I did for our visual Investigation project.