Who Andy Warhol?

·       Real name is Andrew Warhola (8/6/28-2/22/87) (Became Warhol after a misprint)

o   Born in Pittsburgh, PA, Parents from Czechoslovakia (does not exist anymore)

o   Father worked in a coal mine

·       In High School, kicked out of art club because he was “too good”

·       Graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (Bachelor of Fine Arts)

·       Graduated with degree for pictorial design & wanted to become a commercial illustrator

·       Designed advertisements for women’s shoes

·       Used Polaroid camera

·       Fear of hospitals and doctors, hypochondriac

·       Favorite print making technique was silk screening

·       Friends & family described him as a workaholic

·       His sexuality was speculated upon and how this influenced his relationship to art is “a major subject of scholarship on the artist”

·       First solo expedition in 1952

·       Coined the term “15 minutes of fame”

·       1960s: iconic American products (pop art)

·       Created The Factory, his NYC studio from 1962-1968

·       Celebrity portraits developed into one of the most important aspects of his career

·       Made films (first one called Sleep – 6 hours of a man sleeping) (1963)

·       1965 said he was retiring from painting

o   1972 returned to painting

·       Designed cover for the Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers (cover made out of real jean material)

·       Produced Velvet Underground’s first album

·       Started a magazine called Interview, worked for Glamour Magazine, Vogue

·       Shot by Valerie Solanas 3 times for being abusive and “too controlling” (6/3/68)

o   Solanas authored the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, a separatist feminist document

o   "Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television."

·       Marilyn Monroe = favorite model (not painted until after death)

·       Wore silver wigs until he dyed his hair silver

·       Practicing Ruthenian Rite Catholic who described himself as a religious person

·       Died of a heart attack brought on by a gall bladder surgery and water intoxication

·       $100,000,000 for one of his paintings (highest amount paid) (“Eight Elvises”)

·       Referred to as the “Prince of Pop”

Warhol

Photoshop

This picture was originally in color, but then in Photoshop I made it to thershold. Doing thershold took me a lot of time and patience and was very hard to do. In fact, it had a lot of steps and precedures that if you messed on one layer, it is better to start all over. So what I did was make a copy of the image background. Then I had to get rid of all the white areas. Once I did that I made at least ten duplicated layers of that. Then after I had to go to thershold and as I go back down the layer bar and as I go down the thershold becomes darker and darker. Then After I do the color background and as I go down the layer bar, The color I used gets lighter and lighter.

This photograph is three different pictures that I have made into one photgraph. This was my copy and paste picture. The base picture was the picture of the Disneyland rides. Then I had a seperate picture of a girl sitting on a railing of some stairs. So I used the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop copied her and then pasted her onto the base picture. I also had another photograph of another girl looking up in the sky. I thought it would be cool if she would look up and the girl sitting on the railing, think what she was doing up there in the first place. I did the same precedure for copying and pasting the girl looking into the sky as I did for the girl sitting on the railing. But the girl looking into the sky was too big in photograph so I had to change her image size. Then I had to adjust the brightness and contrast in the photograph so it looked like one photograph instead of three different photographs.

This picture is also I copy and paste photo. But it is different in the way I already had set the subject on how I wanted to be. I just added another object into the photograph. I got picture of the Pokemon off from the internet open the picture in Photoshop, used the magnetic lasso tool to copy it then pasted it to my orginal photograph. The Pokemon was too big so i had to adjust the image size to get this photograph.

This picture is a different from my copy and paste photographs. It is two different photographs of mine but instead of putting them on top of each other, I blended them together so you can see both of the full images. I chose these two images because I had one photograph of the running and then I wanted to show that there are people cheering them on as well. Since both pictures where taken outside and the weather was on the dull side, When I first blended them together it was dark. Then before I blended them together, I used the bleding effect of Linear Light so it was not as dark. But then I played around with brightness and contrast to get it how it looks now.

Let It Happen

As these last few weeks past by we spend most of our class time working on different tools we can use in Photoshop. This picture here is an overview of what I learned in Photoshop. We learned many different types of editing pictures like fish eye, black and white, and blending images, and more.

This is my blending image and I first had to choose three images to combine together. The hard part about choosing your three photos are that you have to make sure when you combine them together it does not look too busy. When I applied the picture of the girl on top of photograph of the table of artwork, she was too light. So what I decided to do was go to image of girl and changed the brightness and contrast so that she can stand out more and not get lost in the photograph. Then a drawing from the table photograph was in my way of seeing the bracelet the girl was wearing. I went to the table photograph and used the clone tool to get rid of the artwork on the table to get a clean white paper. Then finally, once I combined those two photographs together it was finally at the image I want to look like. After, I added another photo to the blended one to have three images in one photo. I did not have to do much to the third photograph because it basically already how I wanted to look like.  Once I finished combining all three photos I played around with the brightness and contrast so you can see all the three images as well as if you saw them separately. After that was all done; to add more effects to it, I used the gradient tool to get the dark edges on the photograph. I did not want it too dark because then I would lose the picture that I am trying to portray. 

When we were first learning about photoshop, I thought it was the hardest thing of my life. I did not understand why it had to take so many steps. I was not a fan of photoshop at first, because it just took too long for something really simple. I always thought why we could not just use a website that does it for us. But turns out there are not that many websites that can do the same thing photoshop can do. I became more use to the fact of using photoshop and accepting that it takes time to get the photo you want.