Spray Can (C.6), made alongside Girl as an illustration for Walasse Ting's 1¢ Life in 1964, was one of the first works in which Roy Lichtenstein deployed the Ben-Day dot as a primary element.

The image presented a close-up of a hand pressing the actuator of an aerosol can, the spray shown as diagonal white rays fanning from the nozzle against the blue dot patterning of the background — a work of considerable structural clarity and considerable wit. Walasse Ting's poem runs along the bottom of the page, the print existing from the outset in relation to another artist's text — a condition that anticipated the integrated interaction between word and image that would run through Lichtenstein's work. The subject matter was entirely within the territory of postwar American consumer culture. The aerosol can — hairspray, cleaning product, personal care — was one of the defining objects of the domestic economy of the 1950s and 1960s, its design and advertising imagery as thoroughly codified as anything Lichtenstein had drawn from comic books.

By making it the subject of a fine art print, he extended the Pop Art logic of his output into the most mundane corner of consumer life.

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