Make Yourself a Warhol

Andy Warhol was a prolific modern artist who is synonymous with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. But it's not widely known that this gifted artist pursued a variety of mediums, from his early days as an illustrator for high-end department stores, to the soup can paintings that made him famous, and on to the silkscreens he made for almost twenty years. The silk screen is an interesting medium that produces multiples, each slightly different from the next. Warhol famously made silkscreen pictures of the rich, glamorous and notorious using this medium to create many series of portraits. Perhaps his most famous silkscreen painting shows Marilyn Monroe. He used an iconic photograph and created the memorable image in multiples that are on display in museums and galleries world-wide.

Recently the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA (Warhol's home town) created an App for the iPhone that is both fun and instructional. With it, you can create silkscreen-like images using any photograph you choose. The app mimics the silkscreen process, down to sound effects that approximate the sounds you'd hear in an artist's studio. For instance, when a picture is selected, your iPhone will buzz, like an electric wire shorting out. This simulates  the sound of photo-flash used to create a photographic image on the silkscreen. Using the iPhone camera to take a snap of yourself, you can manipulate the image to create a high-contrast (black and white) self-portrait, which then you can color using a palette of seemingly infinite hues and tones. When you're satisfied that you've got the picture you want, you can complete the process by using your finger to pull a digital squeegee over the image (simulating the application of inks through the silkscreen to the paper), revealing the finished picture, which you can save or send to a friend. It's not easy to create something as striking as a Warhol, but you can have a lot of fun.

By the way, you can buy an original, signed Warhol silkscreen, if you're so inclined, for as little as $45,000. The one reproduced here is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is not for sale. To learn more about Andy Warhol go to www.warhol.org