Lately I’ve been playing with a not-so-new toy—an iPad we got for my now-teen to use with ProCreate in 2021. We’re not an iPad family; it’s been collecting dust in a drawer for a few years now.

A new friend suggested becoming accountability buddies to work toward a specific goal we’ve separately shared long term. It requires illustrating skills that aren’t in either of our arsenals, so we’ve been creating ten minute sketches first thing in the morning and texting them to each other. (It was only after we began this habit that I realized I had set this as a sub-goal for 2024’s resolution for depth.)

I’m still getting the hang of the software. It’s not super intuitive + my not-recent experience with the Adobe Creative Suite has me thinking things are places that they aren’t, like when I mix up my high school French with my college Spanish 🙃.

A few days in to this new habit, I had picked up the book Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. There were several panels in this graphic memoir that grasped me: the writing was punchy and resonant in a way that’s uncharacteristic of the genre. It also hit differently due to recent political changes in America.

A panel resonated so deeply with me that I wanted to print it out and put it on my wall.

I didn’t have luck finding such a thing for purchase, so my gears started turning, and they turned into a Lichtenstein-inspired digital drawing. I found a tutorial on how to begin emulating his style with ProCreate.

This was my first attempt, using stock images.

I worked hard on it, but thought I’d try to create another Lichtenstein-inspired image on ProCreate. It looked, to me, like a weak copy.

I noted in my second try that Roy Lichtenstein used black outlines and blue paint for black hair, while I used three colors including the outlines in my hair. Too much dimension. I also noticed that what is striking about Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art is not just the bright colors and comic book style but the emotions represented by the faces he portrays.

Lichtenstein’s work also featured very high intensity blue, yellow and red.

I took another turn.

Closer, but not quite it.

Then I found myself in pre-burnout mode just thinking about Thanksgiving and upcoming holidays. My husband left me at home while he took the kids to dinner and had a rare veg out session on the couch, during which I watched the Martha Stewart documentary.

I was all in for over an hour—I rarely watch TV so this is quite the feat—when a scene inspired me.

This is from when she was in an active court case regarding insider trading. She had thus far avoided the media frenzy. During an attempt to present a salad recipe on a daytime television show, she was cornered by a reporter and bombarded with invasive questions.

I so often find myself using creative acts to either process or disengage from heavier situations in life. Let the woman focus on her salad, for crying out loud!

That third image was like Roy Lichtenstein’s work in that it used more dots, had a more simplified composition, and the font style resembled his more closely, but a reference photo from the scene lacked the emotional impact of his work. In my fourth try, I did not use a face. Rather, I used a collection of stock images and I simplified the color palette.

It surprises me how much emotion can be conveyed without a face present in an image. With just three comic lines and a star-like image beneath the cucumber, a viewer perceives an intense knife slice, leading to a presumption of intensity, frustration. Coupled with the text, the fingers take on a tense quality that otherwise was not present.

Where my curiosity led me

This is a simple example of me following my curiosity to see where it leads. In this case, I did a multi-work study of Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art pieces that led me through new avenues of conveying emotions in a few simple strokes. It was a lesson in minimization and abstraction that is outside of my usual art, which will lend to my art in the future, in ways I’m yet to discover.