When I planned the list of artists for our 2014 Summer Art Camp dedicated to testing the Language through Art method described by the Paul Getty Museum, I was a little worried about tackling a famous artist like Vincent Van Gogh. I keep asking myself “How will we be able to get kids to recreate the genius of Van Gogh and be proud of themselves?”. I found an interesting post on the Crafty Classroom blog that allowed us to tackle “The Starry Night“. We reinterpreted the orignial into a skyline a little bit closer to home – a big city like Milan…
Ages: 6-10 years old
Word Development: Stars, moon, swirls, curves, dashed lines, circles, hills, village, houses, skyscrapers, streets, streets, street lights, lights, movement, black construction paper, glue, oil pastels, wet, dry, day, night
You will need:
Black construction paper
School glue
Oil pastels
Lets get started:
Step 1: Have the children draw a city skyline with glue on black construction paper. Add familiar skyscrapers to make the city identifiable. For example, we used the Torre Velasca for Milan.
Step 2: Once the city is complete, have them fill the sky with concentric circles, swirls, curves and dashed lines. Don’t forget to add a moon and some stars. Let dry overnight.
Step 3: Have the kids color in the areas created by the glue outline using oil pastels.
Step 4: Remember to emphasize that it is a night view of the city – meaning we needed to put lights in the window of our buildings and add some darker colors to our sky.
Thanks Crafty Classroom – using this approach we were able to tackle Van Gogh and we happy with our results!
take care
Alison
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