I've long had a fascination with simulating Andy Warhol-style serigraphs in Photoshop. Regular readers of this blog may recall dekePod episode 18: "The Andy Warhol Silkscreen Effect" from nearly four years ago.

Frankly, tho, looking back on that effect, it sucks. And at the risk of sounding like a self-righteous, born-again prig, so do everyone else's effects, including those that you can render automatically using Warhol-style device and computer apps. Because here's the thing: even though Warhol was an unapologetic capitalist who believed in exploiting art for money's sake, he wasn't an app or a rote set of instructions. He was an eccentric, oddball, affected, doll-hair-wearing, exceedingly commercial artist. In other words, in the broadest possible sense, Warhol was a human being. You know, like in the way Pluto is a planet.

Which is why for this and the next two weeks, I'm going to focus on that most classic of Warhol techniques, the mass-reproducible, celebrity-obsessed silkscreen/serigraph effect. Today, for example, I'll show you how to convert the portrait shot on the left (not an actual celebrity, but perhaps she deserves to be, also very nicely captured by photographer olly at Fotolia) to the work of highly theoretically high art on the right.

A musician friend of mine once told me, dismissively, that Johann Pachelbel wrote his famous Pachelbel's Canon in five minutes while taking a dump. (This isn't an actual fact. It was just my buddy busting Pachelbel's chops.) Difference is, Andy Dub whipped out his creations in a matter of hours, charged thousands of $$$ for them, and later, after he kicked it, Warhol's stuff dredged up millions in postmortem auctions. (Poor toilet-bound Pachelbel: like all musicians, he could not say the same.)

So I guess my point is this: wanna be an artist and get ahead in life and still have people think you're a legitimate talent? Without wearing doll hair? Well, gosh, dunno if that's possible, but here's a start. Read more » 

Hey kids!

Remember the universal ISOTYPE symbols from last week? How could you forget, right? They're famous from airport bathrooms everywhere. I mean, just looking at them makes you wanna pee. And they have such sparkling personalities, it makes you wanna pee some more. Plus, Colleen devoted 17 blogs posts and a PhD treatise on the topic, culminating in this universal symbol for an airport bar. I know there's another pee joke in there, but I'm beginning to disgust myself.

Tangentially, did you know Valentine's Day is just 2 weeks and 2 days away? That hateful, horrible holiday. And these two, they have so much in common. So rounded and fingerless. He sports spandex, she wear that pretty cow-bell-shaped dress. And when they look at each other with their blank circular faces, you can see the sparks fly. Because you have eyes.

So I thought, let's put these two hotties in the same document and see what happens. And you know what, not to be a spoiler, but they fall in love. Not real, actual love, mind you, but pretend, stupid love, the kind you get when you edit vector-based path outlines in Illustrator. We even get to witness the man give his heart to the lady as a bunch of strokes. Which, frankly, is messed up.

And yet this all goes to a larger point: No one needs talent to draw anymore. You just need the Appearance panel.

Coming soon: How to render the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel using nothing but Illustrator strokes. And ISOTYPE people, of course. Speaking of which, what's the universal symbol for Adam touching God's finger, when they don't have any? And how does a rounded, fingerless, faceless, everythingless character invoke that cheerful old St. Bartholomew displaying his flayed skin? Because he's a gut buster.

This is gonna be tough. See, Michelangelo's peeps are always wandering around with their junk hanging out. And my lover's got no junk.

But you know, now that I think about it, I bet you can solve that problem with lots and lots of strokes. Inside Illustrator. Read more »