Despite the apparently direct relationship between his art and the cartoon sources, Roy Lichtenstein described his process of selecting and transforming images as one of "seeing, composing, and unifying." His drawings reflect how deftly and freely he could adjust the balance of forms, color, line, and detail; these measured studies for paintings were scaled up and projected onto canvas to be enlarged and redrawn.

This process led him to adopt the use of benday dots, which quickly became his signature mark. Just as in the comics, Lichtenstein used these dots in his paintings to convey surface, tone, shading, and form; yet unlike the mechanically printed originals, Lichtenstein's dots were painted by hand on canvas with brush or stencil.