Pride.. A Deeper Love

Pop-Art Pride done in the style of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring

It's the Power that gives you the Strength to Survive...

Whats the word Flockers! Its June and that means it is time for #PRIDE! I wanted to try something this year that I had never seen done before so I choose to do POP-ART. When you think of #popart there is one name that come to everyone's mind, Andy Warhol and in my head that name also brings to mind Keith Haring. Both Andy and Keith were openly gay artist who played part in the gay rights movement in their own way. Andy's work is some of the most iconic and recognizable artwork of our lifetime. Keith Haring although his work is making a resurgence right now might not be as well known by the younger generations. While #AndyWarhol might be better known #KeithHaring used his art to send a message and fight the inequalities and social injustices of his time. You can find his work associated with everything from the Hiv/Aids epidemic of the 80's to Racial injustices. All of that mixed together makes for an awesome starting place for my Pride tree. Here is the Finished Project, then I will Break it down.

The Rainbow Tree

This is the tree that started the whole thing. I found this great tree made by Best Choice Products. So I got pretty excited about this rainbow tree, so excited that I didn't notice it was not pre-lit until it came in and I opened it up. I gave this tree an 8 out of 10 for two reasons I have since changed that to a 9 out of 10. The only reason its not a full on ten is that its not made like other trees I have worked with. Most trees have shapable clusters of steams from the trunk to the end of each branch but this tree has all the shapable peices all clustered at the end of the branch. This does make for a really full looking tree but lacks the depth of a normal tree. By having all the shapable pieces at the end of the branch the inside of the tree is hollow and that was just different for me to work with. I use a lot of picks in the trees I do so there wasn't really much to hold things in place. With that all being said Its still a pretty solid tree.

The work of Andy Warhol...

From Campbell soup to Bananas, He did it all...

For this project to work I would need to reproduce some of his most #iconic works. The most iconic piece of art is probably his Tomato Soup can. The soup can was part of an ad campaign he did for Campbell Soup. He did other Ad campaigns for other companies also., One of the other campaigns was for Brillo pads. Another art peice is a Banana, Warhol crafted the image and slapped it on the cover of his pet band’s first record in 1967. Warhol served as the manager and patron saint of the now iconic art rock band The Velvet Underground.

The Soup can was the first of his artwork I wanted to tackle because it had to be right. I started googling images of the artwork t try and make a template I could use to put on the can. I quickly found out that I didn't have the Patience to make my own templates so I googled Andy Warhol Soup Can template and I found them. I found a great DIY post on the Katie Day Blog and she had a printable option right on her site. Her site gives you 7 different colored Tomato Soup cans. Because I was putting these on a tree I need to empty out some cans to use. I just saved cans from a few weeks worth of cooking, once they had been opened and emptied out I just removed the labels cleaned them out really good. Then just hot glue the printed labels on to the cans. This was a super easy Project to do. I have plans to use these in my kitchen once the tree comes down.

For the Brillo Boxes I turned to Pinterest and I found the template but no link to who created it. The only way to use it was to copy and paste on to MS Word. I printed them at a full page, cut them out, and then followed the lines to fold and glue them in to the shape of the box. Because I wanted them to display like they were just siting on the branches so I used stuck a wooden meat skewer thru the box and that gave me a steam to hold it in the tree. I also used this method to attach the soup cans to the tree.

This ish is Bananas. I think the bananas were my favorite part of this project. They look like they took hours to do but really in total it was less than two hours to do all seven. All you need to make these are fake bananas from the craft store and a sharpie. So I went online and found an image of the Warhol banana to use as a guide, then I took the sharpie and drew the lines on my banana then filled them in and TADA I had my own Warhol bananas!!

The Talented & Beautiful Mind of Keith Haring...

From humans to political statements.

Haring's work grew to popularity from his spontaneous drawings in New York City. They often consisted of chalk outlines of figures, dogs, and other stylized images-on blank black advertising space. His imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". His later work often addressed political and societal themes—especially Homosexuality and Aids.

For his portion of the tree and other decorations I choose to focus mostly on his images of people. The tree has a dark purple stripe that I knew would be perfect to have his dancing people look as if they were dancing around the tree. I had seen the image several times and just needed to track it down and duplicate it. Once I found the image I used Microsoft 3D paint to rip the images from the background and recolor. The image had five dancing figures on it which I enlarged to take up a full size piece of card stock. Once I had them all printed out I just needed to cut them out and figure out how to attach them to the tree. To attach them to the tree I decided I would once again use the skewers. I grabbed a piece of styrofoam and stuck in all the skewers, one by one I put a glob of hot glue on the top pf the skewers and glued the images to the skewers using roughly the middle of the back of all of the images. Once all the glued had dried I was able to just stick the people in the tree and the skewers held them in place.

The tree needed more Keith and I knew it needed to make a statement, I went with a peice of art he created for Act Up in response to the HIV/Aids epidemic. Ignorance = Fear , Silence = Death Fight Aids, Act Up. Click on the words Act Up to learn more. Everyone should learn more.

The crown on the top...

Every Tree need a worthy topper

The tree topper was created using a paper fan from the clearance section at Hobby Lobby and I hot glued another Keith Haring image on the front and attached it to the tree with more skewers of course. This project has make me love meat skewers lol. I also added a few other things to the tree, like the yellow smiley faces and of course lots of metallic sparkly picks. The tree had a lot of color and needed something to break it up so I went with black and white polka dot ribbon that kinda reminded me of comic books or pop art.

I really liked the image that was used for the tree topper and wanted to use it again for something but wasn't sure for what. I knew I wanted a table cloth for the table so why not make my own. so how to do it, why not transfer the images on to the table cloth then paint them kind the way a vintage table cloth would look. The pic below is the finished project. What the picture doesn't show is that the whole edge of the table cloth has the same dancing figures as the tree around the edge but just as outlines.

You can see in the pic above that I made an really large soup can more in the style of the original artwork. I added some pride flags and Keith Haring figures to make for a pretty flocking awesome centerpiece. The can is 7" tall and 20" around so its pretty big and actually took 2 full size images to cover.

The Always there Blue Table...

As you all know by now The always there blue table.. well It is still there.. I used paper honeycomb balls in different colors and a few rainbow ones mixed with left over Soup Cans and Brillo boxes. The picture below picture is the full image complete with a rainbow pinata, metallic fringe, and a banner that says Pride.

Now for the China Hutch, I went with more honeycomb balls, A Vintage Ceramic Tree, and more cans and brillo pads. I filled in gaps with metallic picks for some extra sparkle!