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As part of our Charlotte Mason style education we are starting to explore art through living books and exploration of art techniques as well as looking at prints of famous works.
At the top you can see what we did in an afternoon, using oil pastels. The nice part of this was we worked together and used each others difficulties to see what we could make work better. We were both pleased with the results of our efforts and enjoyed looking at the two prints of his Sunflower pictures we had to see what he had done differently in each one.
Other ideas we have are
*Try Art Ideas Trees with Oil Pastels project
*Have a look at the portraits of Camilles real family. Try some self portraits of us.
*Try drawing with dots (using thick felts maybe?)
*Try a sunflower in dough/felt collage/seeds?
*Use Art History book for a mini timeline/lap book/ make a display of some paintings of his?
*Talk about his life, look at map.
*Acrylics – might work nicely with Starry Night?
*Use all the postcards to put out a visual timeline of the paintings we have and see what that says about his life at the time?
The most useful part of starting this project has been these two really beautiful books
Camille and the Sunflowers which tells a fictionalised story of Van Gogh’s real friendship with a French family
and
Katie and the Sunflowers a whimsical adventure through paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin.
We also organised a home educators group on the theme – the children made salt dough sunflowers, copied works of art, tried self portraits, listened to the stories above, looked at a timeline of Van Gogh’s life and works and used oil pastels and paints.
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Here are some useful links
Huge Collection of Printable Masterpieces
Van Gogh and Gauguin (very beautiful site)