The Pop Art movement started in Britain in the mid 1950s and later extended to the USA. One famous pop art artist was Andy Warhol whose stylistic images of people and popular social icons are famous the world over.
This month we’ll show you how to create a pop art effect reminiscent of Warhol’s pop art style on a portrait. This technique is easy to replicate and we’ll show you how to do this using Paint.net. We’re assuming that you have Paint.net installed on your computer and if not, follow the instructions in Issue 1 for finding, downloading and installing this program.
Launch Paint.net and choose File > Open. Click on a photo of a person to select it and then click Open. Crop the photo to focus on the person’s face by clicking the Rectangle Select tool, drag a rectangle over the face and choose Image > Crop to Selection.
Choose Effects > Noise > Reduce Noise. Adjust the Radius and Strength settings – use a high value such 100 for Radius and use 1.0 for Strength. Click OK.
Select Adjustments > Posterize. Click the checkbox to unlink the colour sliders so you can move them independently. Adjust two of the sliders to get a colour effect and leave the third at its lowest setting (generally Green is best set to 2). When you get an effect you like (if not the colours you like), click OK.
If you like the colour effect but you don’t like the actual colours you can change them. Choose Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and drag on the Hue slider to change the colours in the photo. When you find a mix you like, click OK.
