Lieutenant Bunners shot down (a la Roy Lichtenstein)

As many of you guessed right Lieutenant Bunners shot down was indeed styled to resemble the works of Roy Lichtenstein.

Roy Lichtenstein was am American pop artists; his style was a comics style with very recognizable dots all over the picture, creating an illusion of poster scale printing. In fact most of his paintings are drawn using acrylic paints and stencils to create a proper dot grid.

The concept this time was pretty simple: a guy, a girl and a gun - what's not to love; on the technical level it had to be acrylic paint and benday dots:

Alexandra, Lieutenant Bunners shot down

The artist

Crying Girl, Roy Lichtenstein

Beautiful girls, heroic guys, planes, guns and dots - everything what Roy Lichtenstein needed to make a picture. His paintings made Lichtenstein the second most selling painter of the 20th century right behind Andy Warhol.

His most famous image Whaam is displayed in London's Tate Modern museum (we have visited Tate Modern last month and would recommend it for everybody, even if you have a short trip to London; main exposition is free of charge and as a bonus you get a great view over the Thames and Millennium bridge from the restaurant).

Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam

Judging by the size of the dots you can imagine the size of the painting (actually about 7 m2 - as big as an average bathroom). It is a composite acrylic painting, with only four main colors applied: red, yellow, blue (benday dots) and black. Most probably dots were mass painted on the canvas before the main image using stencil (a piece of plastic or metal with a lot of holes in it).

Lieutenant Bunners shot down

Concept
The concept this time was pretty simple: a guy, a girl and a gun - what's not to love; on the technical level it had to be acrylic paint and benday dots. Of course the most difficult part of the prototyping was to get the dots right. We tried to made a couple with a stencil or draw them directly.

The best shot at stencil looked like this:

However the biggest problem is that paint leaks to the side of the hole; it can probably be avoided using pulverizer, which we unfortunately do not have yet.

Sketching

While I was playing around with stencils, Alexandra did a couple of sketches. The general idea was to place a rabbit as Lieutenant Bunners, or more likely as Lieutenant Saizev (after all the fight most likely took place between American and Russian fighters somewhere over Korea) who crash landed after being shot in Whaam.

Lieutenant Bunners, sketching

Main characters: brave pilot, a bad dog and a girl:

Lieutenant Bunners, sketching, main characters

Execution

A few hours later the drawing was smelling of fresh paints:

Tough looking Lieutenant Bunners/Saizev

Mean dog, jumping of the crash site

Alexandra, Lieutenant Bunners shot down