a faithful attempt

Here's a lovely Van Gogh inspired winter art lesson from the fabulous Painted Paper. 

I pre-traced a large circle on heavy white 9 x 12" paper.  Grade 4-6 students looked at Van Gogh's "Starry Night" painting and drew their own village. They added swirls in the sky to mimic his style. 

They also drew their own base for the snow globe.

Then they outlined everything with a fine tip Sharpie.

And coloured in their village using coloured pencils.

They painted their sky using watercolours. 

We added gold glitter to the moon and stars for some holiday razzle dazzle!

Finally, they cut out their snow globe and glued it onto blue construction paper. 

Some finished artworks!

This project mashes up Van Gogh's famous sunflowers with his Starry Night as a background.

Grade 4 - 6 students started off by practicing sketching a sunflower on scrap paper. Once they were confident in how they looked, they sketched them onto blue 9 x 12" construction paper.

Using oil pastels, I demonstrated how to mimic Van Gogh's technique of short strokes

 and his ability to mix colours. 

Students coloured the sunflowers first them moved onto the background, 

trying to recreate Starry Night using swirls and wavy lines. 

Some Grade 4 -6 pieces:

So it's been sunflowers galore this month with many of my classes in school. I go through phases of hating and then LOVING sunflowers. So this year is a loving year, haha!

I had my Grade 2 class create two different artworks using Van Gogh's Sunflowers series as inspiration. For the first one they used oil pastels (took about two- 40 minute classes to complete) and then they tried again using tempera cakes (again, about two- 40 minute periods to complete).

For the oil pastel version, students drew their still life's on large 12 x 18" coloured 

construction paper. 

I used THIS LINK from the Art blog "Teach Kids Art" for some tips and tricks. Thanks, Cheryl!

My younger kids use the Crayola brand oil pastels and they're pretty good- nice and chunky for smaller hands to grip onto. The one thing I don't like about them is that the wrappers come off them really easily.

The following week, students tried their hand again at sunflowers. This time, instead of drawing them in pencil first, they went in straight with a paint brush on 12 x 18" white paper.

I find tempera trays super convenient to use with larger classes. The colours aren't as vibrant as liquid tempera, but they last FOREVER and are easy for the kids to use and share. I teach them how to mix colours on their paper. Four kids share about 2 or 3 trays at each table, with a big ice cream pail of water in the middle. It works pretty good and clean-up is pretty pain free. TIP: spray your tempera cakes with water in the morning before class to get them damp and ready to use!

Some Grade 2 results: