Mixed media landscape inspired by Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh is alwais intriguing for students, because of his fame, his unfortunate life and his revolution in painting. With students of 8th grade we studied the Van Gogh’s life and art works, and analyzed his unique painting technique. After the observation of lots of Van Gogh’s landscapes, we paint our own landscape, imitating his particular technique. This artist used oil colors with thick, energetic, whirling brush strokes, and we imitated them with oil pastels on a painted background.

First we draw the main lines of the landscape, keeping it quite simple and simplified: mountains on the background, fields, a tree and a road. After we painted the drawing with unnatural colors, using tempera painting with some whirling and thick brush strokes. The effect of Van Gogh’s brush strokes , typically in nervous brief dashes , was obtained with oil pastels. The activity  takes 3 hours. We need:

• drawing sheet
• pencil
• tempera or acrylic painting
• oil pastels