Computer Arts - Issue 75 / Oct 2002
The Art of Pop

Pop. Pop Art, Popular Culture; it is all around us. Learn how and where to find those all-inspiring nuggets from the past and what they offer the designer and illustrator of today...

Nothing in art is new - it's all just reinvented from the past! Just as Pop music plunders it's own back catalogue and Pop Art plundered low-tech advertising of the day, you too can look for 'inspiration' from the mundane!

It took Andy Warhol to recognise the beauty in a tin of Campbell's soup and Roy Lichtenstein to make the humble comic book a thing to behold but now nearly forty years later Pop is still big big news. Warhol's exhibition at Tate Modern earlier this year opened to record attendance and Lichtenstein's death in 1997 fuelled an increase in all things Pop.

The images and icons that Pop took inspiration from are still around. From cheap comic books and consumer magazines printed in the 50's to the illustrated dictionaries and encyclopaedia of the 60's, these items can be picked up for small change if you know where to start. First we look at how to start your own archive of images and in the tutorial show how to use them to best effect. Go on, be a Pop artist!

Expertise and artwork by Lawrence Zeegen. Zeegen is a freelance illustrator and Academic Programme Leader for Communication and Media Arts at the University of Brighton.

Poptastic

The future is now! Well, actually, the future has never been with us quite as quickly as it hits us now, that is for sure. Many of the most important inventions by mankind have surfaced in the last few centuries, if you can ignore fire and the wheel, of course. As communications and travel have improved the globe has got smaller. It was in 1967 that Marshall Mcluhan invented the term 'global village' and look how much has changed since then. The Internet and email, mobile communications and even the humble PC have all been introduced since '67, most sometime after '67 as well. That global village is so much smaller now - think global back yard!

Just what did we do before computers? Before 'new technology', before 'the digital age'? As commercial artists (now known as illustrators) we drew, we painted; the skills utilised involved pencils, pen and ink, brush and paint. By 1967 Pop Art was in full flow in New York City with artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and in London with Peter Blake. These artists took from popular culture, from advertising campaigns, from the work of commercial artists and turned it into 'art'. Warhol knew the score, having previously been a commercial artist, himself.

Pop Art was larger than life. Huge canvases depicting movie stars, Coke bottles, burgers and soup cans as well as detailed copies from cheap comics were influencing the fashion and design worlds. The urban world that had surrounded and influenced these artists was made fashionable and sold right back again.

Commercial artists, meanwhile, were busy working. Many newspapers and most magazines were mainly, if not entirely, printed in black and white and so the demand for black and white line drawings was huge. Publishers of books could not afford to reproduce photographs and so used these commercial artists to produce their images too. Vast numbers of amazing illustrations were created by talented artists/illustrators during this period.

So why the history lesson? Well, this is where you come in. Many of these images still exist and many too are out of copyright. Of course some of the worst examples have ended up in copyright free clip-art archives. Some of the very best are still out there for the taking. Car boot sales, 2nd-hand bookshops, flea markets, jumble sales, charity shops are all likely places to pick up some great images in old mags and books. It is through some dedicated hunting, though, that you will find the kind of images that could grace a great Pop piece.

Only once you have got started on the mission to find the Holy Grail of black and white line drawings will you understand how all encompassing the pastime can be. If you get the bug then searching, scanning and sorting your growing collection will start to take up more of your life than the law should allow. But that is the fun in it. If you collected bubble-gum cards as a kid this is the grown-up version but with more than 48 to collect to make the set.

Probably the single biggest collector of this black and white line-art is a one Mr Charles S Anderson. Andserson, based in Minneapolis, where the stuff grows on trees, has collected so many that he started his own company to market his digitized collection of over 10,000 images. The archive spans images from the 1920's through to the 1970's. The claim is that it took eight years to re-draw the illustrations, involving dozens of artists, tens of thousands of hours and gallons of India Ink! View some samples at http://www.csaimages.com.

Steven Heller is the foremost authority in the USA on the history of graphic design and is editor of the American Institute of Graphic Arts Journal of Graphic Design. He said about Anderson's archive: 'This is either the largest collection of vernacular line art ever assembled, or a whole lot of crummy little drawings.' Don't let that put you off your foraging though. Bringing these nuggets of joy into your own design and illustration projects is good clean fun.

So what to do with the raw material? You've been out and gathered the crucial items at every car boot sale this side of the Channel and now need to create your own archive. Firstly, make a strong cup of tea, put on a good CD and get comfy; you have many happy scanning hours ahead of you. There is no way round this although you could try employing a student, an intern, your children or your parents (if you are a child) to undertake this crucial aspect of the process. You may, as I do, feel that this is taking some of the true enjoyment away from the project and feel the pressure to self-scan too huge. Well, go with the flow.

Scan your treasures at a reasonable dpi so that you can pick up all of the detail. I suggest 1800 dpi saved as a tif file so that they can be imported into most applications. Make sure that you spend a little time checking the scan carefully for damaged areas of the illustration, quite common when scanning old material. Also, it pays to erase any unwanted areas of dirt, grit and muck at this stage too.

Once you have a few scans ready to archive you should set up a system so that searching for images at later date is not a complete headache. Put all hands into a folder marked 'Hands' and heads into one named 'Heads' for example. This really isn't rocket science but easily overlooked. Imagine the problems that Charles Anderson would be having right now without a clever system in place.

So although the future is here and now, you can keep hold of those little treasures from the past. Fred Woodward, Creative Director at Rolling Stone magazine, may not agree on the description though; 'There's nothing retro about it - these images could have been drawn just as badly today as in 1945'.

© Lawrence Zeegen