Ashley Jager
- Oct 22, 2021
- 2 min read

A Sweet Tooth for Pop Art

The grocery aisles seem to be bursting with brightly colored packages of Halloween candy! It's the time of year when our sweet cravings are tempted by the visual overload of candy advertisements that make up our popular culture. In the 7th grade art class, we took the opportunity to indulge in the seasons and take a bite out of Art History with Pop Art.

The Pop Art movement blurred the lines between fine art and images found in popular culture. Advertising, comics, and the mundanely mass-produced objects were reimagined as works of art. Artists pushed the boundaries of what is considered fine art by simplifying their subjects from everyday life with the statement of bright, bold colors mass produced. The students were introduced to some of the big-time names in Pop Art as visual examples before brainstorming how to represent our own works of Pop Art.

My 7th graders were given the challenge to represent their own interpretation of Pop Art through their favorite popular sweets in an exaggerated scale with flat shapes and dramatic colors. They also practiced cropping the frame in their preliminary sketches to feature an extreme close up using scale and proportion instead of the whole dessert.

Of course, this exercise could only be sweetened with a little taste testing! I brought in Halloween candy for my students to draw from while snacking on their treats.

As they satisfied their sweet cravings, the students transitioned from their sketches to watercolor paper by painting in large areas with bright, bold colors.

Watercolor works best in layers but it can also easily blend together if not careful. As each layer of color dried, students moved around the paper emphasizing individual areas with more pigment one at a time so that the colors would remain separate and pop out from the background.

When their layers were complete, the final touches of their sweet tooth paintings involved tracing all the shapes with sharpie marker for bold outlines. It was exciting to see them portray their favorite sweets in such a playful manner. These paintings really pop out from the page!