Artist Study March- van Gogh

I've really been enjoying the book Literature for Lively Lessons since I acquired it from Paperback Swap sometime last year. I love the list of famous birthdays which include authors and illustrators among others. I used it to put together some craft kits for R11 and I've found useful for choosing some artist study themes.

You may or may not remember that we have a year round pencil shaped evergreen tree in our dining room and I like to change it out for the seasons. Although, with the house on the market, I really thought it was time to make sure folks knew it was not a Christmas tree we'd been too lazy to take down. Or...that I really like the tree and it totally makes that corner of the room. And if all else fails, hopefully their imagination will remind them it won't be there when they move in! So, I decided it was the perfect place to share art prints and biographical information about our artist of the month!

I used some van Gogh prints on stickers to make cards for the tree.

Along with the prints and fact cards, I decided a project to go along with the artist would be fabulous! We've been doing this toward the end of the month that the artist is feature and we talked about the prints and the artist while doing the project. It was a great follow up to some purposeful placement learning!

Two family favorites!

We did this one years ago and I thought it would be fun to revisit it.

Plenty of information to go round as the kids worked and I read and shared.

van Gogh liked to work with a thick paint call impasto. He used to apply paint to his paintings by using a knife and scraping it on. To make our impasto, we put craft glue in with the paint. There are recipes to make it with a thickening powder like cornstarch or flour as well and I'd like to try that next time. The book pictured above, Discovering Great Artists, is a great resource for trying out various techniques of famous artists. We also like Storybook Art which focuses on children's book illustrators.

Making impasto

We started with drawings...

The answer to your question is no. Coffee filters do NOT work for this task. Don't try this at home.

Love our BioColor paints from Discount School Supply- it's time to restock a few colors.

The thick paint lets you put texture in your painting. R11 really liked playing with the texture.

Lots of colorful results!

J6 really liked the swirls.

Once the paintings were dry, which took half the day outside in the breezy spring air, I put them in the art gallery frames in the dining room. They sure are bright and cheerful!

Our current artist of the month is Garth Williams- the beloved children's book illustrator. His work is very fun on our tree and he led a really interesting life! Stay tuned for our report on his project (which is yet to occur).