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Easy Artist Lesson for Kids: Andy Warhol Cups
This is an easy art lesson to teach kids about Andy Warhol. The design on the cups can be changed to reflect the season. This lesson is hot cocoa mugs during Christmastime.
About the Artist
Andy Warhol was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburg Pennsylvania.
When Andy was eight years old, he got sick and had to stay in bed for a long time. His mother was an artist and spent time teaching him how to draw. She gave him his first camera when he was 9 and always encouraged his creativity.
Warhol attended school to studied pictorial design. He began his career working as a commercial artist creating advertisements and logos. He focused on becoming a great artist with his paintings in the 1950’s. Warhol worked in painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, film, and music.
Pop Art
Warhol was part of the Pop Art Movement. Pop Art, short for Popular Art, focused on using everyday objects and images as art subjects. In the 1960’s, Warhol made a series of paintings with everyday objects and famous people. His art involving the Campbell’s Soup cans is recognized by many. The Museum of Modern Art featured many of Warhol’s artworks.
Andy Warhol’s work featured a lot of repeated images in the same art piece. He used photographic silkscreen printing and took an image and repeated it over and over. He often used crazy colors over the same image.
The Lesson
Inspired by Warhol’s repeated image, this art lesson takes the image of a cup and repeats it in four quadrants, each quadrant colored differently.
This lesson requires little to no prep work. Depending on the age level of the artist, you may not need to do any prep work. If the artist is younger, it may be easier to draw out the lines on the paper for them. To speed the lesson along, I created a stencil for the kids to trace. The stencil also ensures that the images look as similar as possible.
First, the artists traced the same image in all four quadrants. Next, the artists darkened the lines with Sharpie for more definition. I then instructed them to create an image on the cup that could be easily repeated on the other three cups. I also encouraged them to think of an image that would be on their hot cocoa cups at Christmas time since we did this lesson in December.
After the image was repeated on all four cups, I instructed the artists to color the entire paper. No white spaces. They were encouraged to use bold and bright colors and to color the images in "unnatural" colors. Some had a difficult time making trees anything other than green, while others got right to it. All finished artwork turned out great.