The Andy Warhol Silkscreen Effect

dekePod Episode 018: Okay, I got good news and I got bad news. Good news first: dekePod has caught up with its younger sibling Martini Hour. For this brief moment in time, both are 18.

Also good, this new episode, it's a doozy. In this video, I show you how to turn any portrait shot--even a sweetly syrupy photo of two youngsters in real honest-to-gosh puppy love--into a credible Andy Warhol silkscreen effect. Complete with minimalist outlines, vivid fills, and lipstick that covers the teeth. Here's the official marketing description:

Have you ever wanted to create an authentic looking Andy Warhol silkscreen? One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Warhol was known for his avant-garde paintings and screenprintings. Remember Warhol’s garishly colored celebrity images of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, or Mao Zedong? In the studio he called The Factory, Warhol took an assembly-line approach to his high-contrast, silkscreens and produced art as a mass consumable, like a t-shirt or a pack of gum. It’s not surprising that his art is still popular today, and there are lots of one-click Warhol solutions. But if you want the real thing, join Deke McClelland in the final episode of this dekePod series, as he dissects Warhol’s process, and shows you how to use Photoshop to render your favorite portrait in bona-fide Warhol magnificence.

By way of example, I came up with this original take on Marilyn, one which could reasonably serve as the banner of yet another podcast. Colleen and I might be sitting around, cocktails in hand, discussing which celebrity is most deserving of artistic exploitation this week. Whatcha think?

Despite its minimalist appearance, the Warhol silkscreen technique is actually fairly involved. I'll post an article documenting the many steps next week. In the meantime, this dekePod shows you everything, provided that you take the time to review the frames. To download the video for obsessive replay, try one of these links:

• For a high-quality QuickTime movie, right-click here and choose Save Target or Download Link or the equivalent.
• For an M4V file that you can play on an iPod, right-click here and choose one of those same commands.
• Or you can subscribe to dekePod via RSS or iTunes.

You can also check out the page at my book publisher O'Reilly Media.

Okay, so enough delaying, now for the bad news: This is the final episode of dekePod in this format. Blame the down economy, my overly ambitious nature, or my sponsors getting wise to the seditious nature of the piece. (Personally, I blame The Man. Dude didn't have anything to do with this thing, but he's still a jerk!) Whatever the reason, after two pilots and 18 regular episodes, the money has dried up.

But that doesn't mean dekePod is dead. In fact, it is very much undead. As in the Pirates of the Caribbean spirit of the word. Having touched the Web 2.0 equivalent of Cursed Aztec Gold, the impossible-to-kill skeleton of dekePod roams the world in search of new opportunities. Here are two examples:

• To have your flesh picked by the phantoms of ancient dekePods (and keep up with future ghostly developments), check out my new dekePod channel at youtube.com/dekepod.
• I can't actually tell you about the second opportunity. But it's coming up real soon. And like everything I do, it'll be either a rousing success or a hideous flop. That alone makes it worth waiting for, right?

Oh, and lest I forget, I have plans to document this very technique in a series of authentically educational videos at lynda.com. Hilariously, what I explain in 7 minutes and 5 seconds in this dekePod video will probably require something like 45 authentic-training minutes. To get a sense for what my "authentic" training looks like, check out my most recent series, Photoshop CS4 One-on-One: Mastery, part of the lynda.com Online Training Library. Weighing in at 13 hours, it is nothing if not comprehensive.

And with that, I will take my leave of you and the initial round of dekePods. Parting is such sweet sorrow. Only, see, there is no parting with the undead . . . !