You may have hundreds of photos of yourself, friends, family, favorite celebrities, or pets on your phone. That’s the beauty of smartphones; you can capture any moment on camera for keeps. Actually, research conducted on a sample of 215 Germans indicated that most of them used their phones primarily for taking photos. (1)

As photos are cherished mementos, you can decide to alter them into even more captivating forms instead of deleting or leaving them in their original format. One such way to do this would be to transform them into pop art.

This is a classical art technique that incorporates fine art skills to depict pop culture imagery. It dominated the art industry from the 1950s to the 1970s. Presently, there are dozens of apps or software programs you can use to convert your photo to pop art. This article gives you a step-by-step guide on how to use one of them for the conversion process: (2)

1. Upload the photo
To begin, select the photo you want to transform into pop art. You may source it from your phone’s internal storage or any other storage location. Then, upload it into the photo-editing app or program.

2. Choose a mood board
The mood board is your point of reference. It’s the first draft of your work that sets the theme. It’ll enable you to develop ideas of how to advance your photo editing process. A typical mood board comprises of:

• Color swatches
• Photo (image) inspiration
• Text fonts
(3)
The mood board will also help you visualize how the final pieces will appear. From this idea, you can decide if you’ll frame the printed images on glossy paper, stick them on your wall, or make canvas prints out of them.

3. Erase background noises
The images on pop art should stand out. For this reason, you should eliminate all the distracting background features to make the main image more conspicuous.

To do this, you can:
• Crop and erase some background details from the image
• Replace the busy background with a solid color such as white

4. Adjust the photo dimensions
As you may intend to hang your art on the wall, you should blow up the photos to a size that matches the custom canvas prints you intend to order.

Here are some common dimensions you’d want to follow:
• 8” x 10”
• 11” x 14”
• 16” x 20”
• 20” x 30”
• 24” x 36”
• 30” x 40”
• 40” x 60”

5. Create an outline
Your next step is to trace a bold line around the image. Preferably, you should use bold colors, such as black, as it’ll clearly outline the photo. Focus on outlining the external parts like the hair edges and body profile first. To make your image appear more natural, create a smooth transition from one outline to the next by avoiding regular lines and making the outlines curvier.



6. Fill in the colors
You should now color the solid features, such as the clothes, hair, or other accessories. For the hair colors, choose yellow for blondes and black for brunettes. Pop art broadly utilized bold colors, such as red, yellow, or blue. You may use these colors for the clothes or go with the original color. (4)

As you color your photos, think about how you’ll decorate your home. Your home decor and the resultant pop arts should match and not clash.

7. Work on the face
You’ll draw thin lines on the edges of features such as the nostrils, eyelids, pupils, lips, and other protruding facial features.

Next, color the features. For instance, for the eyes, you can add white for the eye whites first, then blue for the iris, and finally black for the pupils. To add some sparkle to the pupils, you may tint it with a tiny white patch. You can fill the teeth area with white and a red shade from your color palette for the lips.

8. Add the skin tone
In art, skin color palettes should use warm, analogous tones. You can add these tones to your image from the color swatch. You can also apply halftone textures to specific areas of the skin or other image parts to make it more classical. (5)

9. Polish for finer details
Go over your image and make final refinements, like making the eyes larger. Doing so gives it a more cartoon-like appearance. You can add background colors, such as blue or red, on the plain background to give it more pop art features.

10. Save your image
Finally, save your image on the app or software. You can retrieve it at a later date and make custom canvas prints from it to hang on your walls.

Conclusion
Pop art, which adds a classical appearance to your photos, is a trend that has seen a resurgence over recent years. This article has shown you how to transform your favorite photo into pop art. The steps include: uploading the photo, choosing a mood board, erasing background noises, creating an outline of your image, filling in the colors, working on the face and skin tone, polishing your image with finer details, and finally saving it.

By following these steps, you can add diversity to your photos by giving them the classical look of pop art, and then you can print them on canvas, metal, or paper, and hang them on your walls.

References
1. “How Many, What And Why? Visual Media Statistics On Smartphones And Tablets,” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283877649_How_many_what_and_why_Visual_media_statistics_on_smartphones_and_tablets
2. “Pop Art,” https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/glossary-terms/pop-art
3. “Creating A Color Mood Board,” https://www.thespruce.com/how-to-create-a-color-mood-board-797789
4. “Creative Project - Create Pop Art Like Roy Lichtenstein,” https://ravensdale-coventry.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Creative-Roy-Lichtenstein.pdf
5. “Designing An Inclusive Skin Tone Palette,” https://medium.com/@kellyleigh/designing-an-inclusive-skin-tone-pale-84481cb01913