Lesson 21 - The Starry Night - Vincent Van Gogh

Today we concentrated on one very famous painting “The Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh. Because this painting is very recognizable and created in abstract brush strokes, we decided to dissect it and have each student reproduce a piece of the painting on a rectangular piece of foam board.

The children were able to “zoom in” on each individual piece of the painting and actually concentrate on the colors and the brush strokes. It’s the same technique as painting what you see under a magnifying

glass. This was very fitting for the young artists, many of whom are painting in an abstract style; and recreating an individual piece of this particular artwork lends itself to their abstract style.

The artists were given a piece of blue foam board, because blue is the predominant background color in the painting. They also used acrylic paint colors that closely matched the colors of the brush strokes used by Van Gogh. They were all encouraged to look primarily at the colors used in their piece, and also how the colors “moved” on the painting (eg. left to right, in a swirl, in a circle, or angular). Depending on the relative difficulty of each piece, some of the younger children still needed some assistance in completing their art piece.

The individual  pictures were put aside to dry. They will be sprayed with fixative and reunited when the time comes to put them together again and recreate the Starry Night masterpiece.


(Because this is a class project as well as an individual project, it is time consuming and will take multiple weeks to complete).