Studying Great Artists: Vincent Van Gogh

I have wanted to study great artists myself for a long time and I finally decided to give it a go.  My search very quickly led to me a book by MaryAnn F. Kohl called Discovering Great Artists.  I will be exploring this book a lot this year.  It is excellently done.  I had the book in my home for a few weeks and still hadn't taken the time to look into it much when my son brought up how cool his art lesson was at school as we were driving home last week.  He said he learned about an artists that drew a cool starry sky.  He couldn't remember his name, but I knew right away what he was talking about.  

My kids school has an art teacher independent of the other teachers.  This is nice in that my daughter had the exact same lesson although she wasn't in his class.  They had watched a film about Vincent Van Gogh, but that was it.  They were given a coloring sheet to color in of his starry night!  Really.  A coloring sheet!  I think the art teacher is okay.  Some of the things the kids do in there is very educational, but I was so frustrated with a coloring sheet on Van Gogh.  So I told my kids about my new book.

When we had time we looked at the two pages about Van Gogh.  It has a bit about his life and how he painted.  We learned that he painted in a style called Impasto.  Impasto is painting done with very thick paint.  It is usually applied with a knife or brush and the brush strokes or knife strokes are shown because of the thickness.

First I had the children look through a bunch of Van Gogh paintings to get the idea of the Impasto style.  They wanted to draw the exact pictures they liked.  James chose Starry Night, Ally chose Sunflowers, Grace did her own thing, and I chose Starry Night over Rhone.


We thickened our paint up with laundry soap (next time I will use flour or corn starch.)  I actually used borax thinking it was just laundry soap, but I think that is the wrong thing.  It made the paint like sand.  We worked with it anyway, but I think a thicker not grainier paint was what we were supposed to do.


The paint was really hard to work with at this point to apply.  It didn't stick to our papers.  My eldest who tends to complain eventually went to just regular paint without any thickeners.

 My son struggled too and I told him just to use regular paint, but he was insistent on doing it just like Van Gogh.


My baby had no problems.  Two year olds are perfect for tyring new things.  She got right in and into it.  No complaining.  Just slopped it on and moved it around!


I used a knife the entire time and even tried mixing my colors right on the paper as Van Gogh did.  It was really hard.  I found this method to make my drawing look even more childish than my children's paintings, but it was interesting to see the textures it helped me to make too.

Starry Night over Rhone by Laura

Red Heart by Grace

Starry Night (not finished yet) by James

Sunflowers by Ally