How To

How to Print like Warhol

Discover how artist Andy Warhol made his colourful and iconic silkscreen prints

A bit of background

From Brillo boxes and black bean soup to portraits of films stars, Andy Warhol is famous for his bright and bold paintings and prints that celebrate 1960s popular culture. This style of art is called pop art.

Printmaking appealed to Warhol as it allowed him to repeat a basic image and create endless variations of it by using different colours or sometimes adding paint to the printed surface.

Warhol Marilyn Diptych
Exhibition PAST EVENT

Andy Warhol

A new look at the extraordinary life and work of the pop art superstar

Tate Modern
12 Mar – 15 Nov 2020
Free

Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?
Andy Warhol

In 1972, Warhol made a series of screenprints of Chairman Mao, the leader of communist China. Mao may seem an unlikely celebrity, but in the early 1970s America’s president, Richard Nixon, visited Beijing and Mao’s portrait was everywhere – making him something of a contemporary icon. Warhol used a photograph from the cover of the Little Red Book (a book of quotations by Chairman Mao) as the starting point for his portrait.

Discover more about Warhol and pop art

Be inspired by silkscreen portraits

Explore more printmaking techniques

Close