Use pop art to pep up your portraits with Photoshop

Make a pop art portrait in Photoshop
(Image credit: PhotoPlus Magazine)

Artist Andy Warhol’s brightly colored images were created by cutting holes in paper to create stencils that revealed various parts of a monochrome photo. He then applied paint to the exposed sections of the photo and gradually built up an image made from different blocks of color. 

By mixing photography and old-school artistic techniques such as screen-printing, Warhol created distinctive and colorful works that caught the imagination of the art world. His distinctive style was applied to all sorts of subjects, from tins of soup to portraits of Marilyn Monroe. He then increased the visual impact of his portraits by creating differently colored versions of the image and mounting them together on the same canvas.

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George Cairns

George has been freelancing as a photo fixing and creative tutorial writer since 2002, working for award winning titles such as Digital Camera, PhotoPlus, N-Photo and Practical Photoshop. He's expert in communicating the ins and outs of Photoshop and Lightroom, as well as producing video production tutorials on Final Cut Pro and iMovie for magazines such as iCreate and Mac Format. He also produces regular and exclusive Photoshop CC tutorials for his YouTube channel.