Pop Art Valentine Cookies

Last weekend, I picked up a new toy that I can't wait share with you. I was roaming the scrapbook aisle of a Michaels craft store and found a cool-looking stencil by Heidi Swapp.

The stencil itself is a simple pattern of tiny dots. I immediately thought it would make a cool pattern to airbrush on a cookie for a comic book / pop art look.    

You probably know the look I'm talking about. It's the retro style that pop artist Roy Lichenstein made famous.  

I bought the stencil hoping I could replicate that very look. Here's how I went about making Pop Art Valentine cookies.

Pop Art Valentine Cookies

Cookie Cutters

I must admit, the cookie cutters I used for these Pop Art Valentine cookies were very large in scale. That was sort of on purpose. I wanted most of the dot pattern to still be visible after I added all details.

For these cookies I went with a large heart from this Betty Crocker collection, a square cutter I got from a gingerbread house set, and a cloud shape that I made from a flower cutter.

Making the cloud cutter was a nifty trick I learned from Sugarbelle. I grabbed one scalloped round cutter from this Wilton blossom set and squooshed it into an oval shape.

Airbrushing Stencils on Cookies

After applying a base layer of royal icing to the cookies, I let them dry completely overnight. Once the icing was dry, I prepared them to be airbrushed.

The key to getting a pretty decent airbrushed pattern onto a cookie is magnets. This is yet another trick I learned from Sugarbelle. Callye shared an idea by Kim of Kookie Creations by Kim that really makes handling stencils a breeze. Below is the gist of magnet setup, but please check out the Callye's post for all the details.

Here are my finished airbrushed cookies. They aren't super perfect, but I'm still very pleased with how they turned out. It is definitely better than what I could have done with just using my two hands.

Comic Book Lettering

For the cloud cookies, I wanted to add words in a comic book style font. There were tons of free comic book fonts to choose from online, but the one that I went with had a neat drop shadow that I really liked.  

If you're interested, the font I used is called Thwack!!! downloaded from FontSpace.

I printed out the words I planned on using on a sheet of paper. However, looking it over, I didn't like the spacing between the letters. I decided to trace over the letters onto tracing paper, in an overlapping style that you sometimes see in comic books. This overlap gave the words more of a visual impact.

After finalizing how I wanted the words to look, I popped the tracing paper into my Kopykake and piped the designs onto the cookies. I also added a black drop shadow to the cloud cookie itself to finish off the look.

Decorated Pop Art Cookies

For the remaining Pop Art Valentine cookies designs, I took inspiration from two of my favorite cookiers. Angela, of Oh, Sugar Events, did a wonderful pop art cookie tutorial last year. I used her technique to decorate the heart cookies below.

Georganne, of LilaLoa, did a great post on kissing lips and inspired me to include lips in this set. However, I eventually went with clipart of lips that I purchased to complete the pop art look.

Pop Art is such a fun theme to make on cookies and the colors are so vibrant. These pop art cookies were made for Valentines Day, but the theme could easily be adapted for other occasions like birthdays, or maybe Mothers or Fathers Day.