Roy Lichtenstein Inspired Kawaii Paintings

Have you ever had that ah-ha moment that magically brings a lesson together?  That 'click' happened for me when coming up with the idea for this Roy Lichtenstein inspired lesson.  While developing a unit on Roy Lichtenstein I had already decided on a primary coloured dot art activity, as well as an action word one, so when it came to coming up with an idea for creating acrylic paintings I wanted to do something different.  After perusing images of Roy Lichtenstein's artworks I honed in on his landscapes such as Sunrise 1965, and Sinking Sun 1964

Roy Lichtenstein, Sunrise, 1965

Roy Lichtenstein, Sinking Sun, 1964

I also wanted to emphasize Lichtenstein's use of cartoon and comic strip images for his pop art.  Learning that Lichtenstein's landscapes were inspired by Japanese art I wondered if there might be a way to connect the two.  That's when I discovered Kawaii.  If you are unfamiliar with Kawaii it is an element in Japanese pop culture signifying cuteness.  Examples of Kawaii that your students would likely be familiar with are anime characters such as Hello Kitty and Pikachu from Pokemon.  For our paintings we looked at these Kawaii clouds for inspiration:

The finished artworks are a cool mash up of Kawaii and Roy Lichtenstein pop art, and turned out fantastic!  Some of the Kawaii style facial expressions on the clouds are a bit hard to see given the colour choices, but I think that you can still tell by the variety how much the kids enjoyed adding this layer of personality to their paintings.  On a final note, while we did add a lot of dots and concentric circles, I would have liked the kids to create dots with a more Ben-day dot technique, so if anyone has any suggestions that would be great!