benday

The text boxes and thought bubbles traditionally found in comics, along with the exaggeration and flatness of forms, the symbolic use of colors, enlarged Benday dots and of course, the visual lexicon of gesture notations explosions, swooshes and booms--are also components of the comic vocabulary incorporated by today's artists.

I informed the students that the imitation of Benday screen dots, which are used in reproducing pictures in newspapers and comic books, is a technique that is commonly found in Lichtenstein's paintings.

For example, commercial ads have Roy Lichtenstein's Pop art style, including not only the benday dots, banal subject-matter, etc., but even his irreverent sense of humour and irony.

Have students do a rough sketch of their composition, and them recreate it by cartooning the image using the techniques present in Lichtenstein's painting, such as black outlines, primary colors and Benday dot patterns.

" There's a consistency between the Pop art style of the artist and the glitzy design of the book from the "POW" on the cover to the benday dot end sheets.

He's revisited the artist persona many times over the past decade and has exhibited a sprawling array of works reappropriating the bric-a-brac of consumerism--bar codes, Benday dots, plastic bottles, Legos, toy soldiers, and so on--in a steady stream of shows and public-sculpture commissions.

By employing recognizable images from popular culture, such as Mickey Mouse (Look Mickey, 1961), and by incorporating the heavy black outlines, Benday dots and saturated primary colors of the funny papers, Roy Lichtenstein helped usher in a new visual vernacular perfectly suited to America's rapidly growing consumer culture.

It's a bit like the Benday dots in Roy Lichtenstein's paintings: When the dots are so enlarged, the effective illusion of the image starts dissolving.

In addition to the black outlines, primary colors, and Benday dots that characterize the artist's style, strong horizontal lines in the foreground and background suggest the rush of air streaming along the car as the couple fly down the road in chilly silence.

Finding a way to reproduce the look of benday dots in Lichtenstein's work was a difficult task for artist Greg Olmstead.

First utilized by Lichtenstein to mimic mechanical printing, Benday dots would become the Pop artist's signature device, and his mirror beckons to a reflection beyond that which it depicts--a meditation on vanity, appearance, and portraiture.

We see full-screen paintings, along with close-ups of a number of works by each artist: Warhol's soup cans, Thiebaud's pies, cakes and gumball machines, and Lichtenstein's enormous paintings of details seen in cartoons, all painted in his Benday dot technique.

From afar, the variety of patterns brought to mind the optical effects of Benday dots or a polka-dot Photoshop brush.

In keeping with the ideas of Pop Art where artists imitated mechanical methods of reproduction, Lichtenstein painted evenly spaced dots called "Benday dots" to show shading.

Recalling Benday dots or punch cards, the latter, more than any of the works here, channel the dumb repetitions of machines.