Everyone loves the iconic Pop Art image of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol, and with this easy to follow tutorial you can have your own Pop Art portrait, these pictures make great gifts for your friends or family or even yourself. They are fun and stylish and will brighten up any room in your house.

Open the selected portrait in Photoshop. Make sure your layers palette is showing on screen if not select, window > layers to bring it up.

Then the next step is to click on the adjustment icon (the half black half white circle icon) at the bottom of the layers palette, once you have clicked on this a menu will appear and from the list you will need to select threshold.

The threshold adjustment layer simplifies your image, it allows you to see the
brightest and darkest part of your image by moving the slider to the left and
right. The threshold layer posterizes your image into a pure black and pure
white image making it instantly more pop art.

What we need to do is control the threshold slider for various parts of the image so we can achieve a line art effect which is the basis of pop art. We can’t get all the details at once as if you move the slider to get detail in the eyes then other
parts of the image become too dark and the detail is lost. So we have to create
2/3/4 threshold adjustments and then blend them together to get the perfect
basis for our pop art image.

On the first adjustment layer work on the hair highlights, move your slider to the left until you can see sufficient detail in the hair, when you are happy click ok or
click back onto your background image.

Now select the adjustment and threshold again and move the slider to get the detail in the eyes. Now you will need to bring the hair highlights out, so select a hard brush with the colour black and paint the highlights back in on the mask layer attached to the threshold layer. If you make a mistake and take to much detail out you can sway your colour to white and paint it back in. Play around with the brush tool until you are happy with the effect.

Now we need to get mouth detail in the image, so click on the background layer again then click on the adjustment icon again and then the threshold icon. Move the slider to the right to get some good detail to show through for the mouth area. Now you need to mask out all the other areas apart from the nose and mouth, so select you black hard brush again and paint the details back in to the image. Try to keep some detail around the chin as well.

Once you have sufficient detail in all areas of the image so the threshold masking is complete. Now it is time for the fun part!!

The next step is to paint in the colour. The first thing we are going to do is paint in the face. Click on the top adjustment layer and then click on the create new
layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette. This will give you a new layer
at the top of the stack, now you need to change the blending mode of this
layer, so where it says normal at the top of the layers palette click on the arrow
and select multiply from the drop down menu.

Now you need to choose a colour for your skin tone, from the colour tab use the eye dropper to select the skin tone you want. Pop art always uses a hard edge
brush, so select your paintbrush with 100% hardness and size around 300 and
start painting in your skin tone. Be careful not to paint over the eyes and
mouth but if you do just use the eraser tool to correct it.

Now it’s time to select a hair colour a bright yellow is always a good choice for pop art. Paint in the hair everywhere you know it is supposed to be, you can refer
back to your original image if you need to.

Once you have painted in the hair it’s time to add a nice red colour to the lips. Choose a red and then select a smaller brush size and zoom in to paint the lips. (If you really want to achieve the Marilyn Monroe style then choose a bright blue
and paint in some eye shadow)

The final thing to do is to paint the background, choose a nice bright colour and get stuck in!

Once you happy with the way the final image looks you need to flatten the image, so from the main toolbar at the top of the screen select Layer > Flatten image.

Now you have created your basic image there are lots of things you can do with it. A lot of Andy Warhol’s famous artworks are the same image reproduced into a grid. So I will show you how you can achieve that.

Let’s work on a four grid style image (2 x 2 grid). You will need to make 4 copies of your image so select your background image and press CTRL + J to make a copy, do this until you have 4 layers. Now we need to edit the size of our canvas, make sure the foreground and background colours are set as black and white.

Select Image from the toolbar and then Canvas Size… enter width 100cm and height 100cm make sure the relative box is checked and the anchor box is in the corner.

Zoom out and re position the layers until they are in a 2 x 2 grid. Crop the canvas size if necessary to fit the new image.

If you want you can change the colours for each individual portrait to create a real pop art inspired image. Click on the selected layer and select from the toolbar, Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. Move the sliders around until you have some interesting colours, repeat this step for each image.

And there you have it your completed Andy Warhol Pop Art inspired image!!

About the author

Abigail Geer wrote 5 articles on this blog.

I am an Artist and Web Designer/Builder currently living and working in Northern Spain. I studied Art and Creative Writing at University where I specialized in photography and photo manipulation. Art and design are my passions and I am interested in all aspects of them, I love writing and sharing my knowledge with others.

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