'Katie and the Starry Night' and Van Gogh Inspired Landscapes

I came across an activity for drawing Harvest Skies in the style of Vincent Van Gogh on Crayola's website and I decided it would be the perfect inspiration for a little artist study.

First we watched some videos to learn a little bit about Van Gogh.

"Katie and the Starry Night" by James Mayhew is an adorable story about a little girl who explores the paintings on Van Gogh really up close! It's a great introduction to several of Van Gogh's paintings.

To learn a little more about the artist himself, we enjoyed the short animated video, "Art with Mati and Dada: Van Gogh."

And finally, it was time to create! It was a beautiful afternoon so we took all our art supplies outside and set up on the patio. Using the following landscape paintings as inspiration, we set off to create our own landscapes.

Sower at Sunset

The Starry Night

Wheatfield with Crows

Wheat Fields Near Auvers

Before we get into it, I have a little disclaimer that I'm sure I'll repeat with all our art lessons. When we learn about artists, we like to look at several of their pieces and learn about their methods, styles, and favorite themes. After that, I present the kids with an art activity that builds on those things. I give a few parameters to the project, but the important thing is that the kids get to create their own original piece of artwork inspired by what they have seen and learned. Replication is not the goal and there's no right or wrong way to make art. Also, I highly encourage you to get in on the art action with your kids!

Here were the parameters of our Van Gogh inspired landscapes:

1. Create a landscape - choose any outdoor setting you like

2. Use pencil to draw your large shapes (ex. horizon line, hills, mountains, trees...) then use oil pastels to color it in

3. (optional, depending on age) We noticed in the paintings that Van Gogh liked to use a lot of short strokes that came together to create a shape rather than carefully drawing the outline and filling it in. Color in your landscape using lots of short strokes and use various shades of color together.

I absolutely love how we all started with the same inspiration pieces and yet all of our landscapes ended up looking completely different!