Draw a Landscape Using Vincent Van Gogh's Drawing Technique

      Both of these art teachers taught the same lesson. However, they gave their students different mediums and papers. The students in one class used oil pastels on black paper and the students in the other classroom worked with magic markers on white drawing paper. In both instances, their art teachers taught them how to use short choppy marks to define space, color and landscape, just as Van Gogh did when he drew landscapes.

Drawing by Vincent Van Gogh

      Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died aged 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found). His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still.

      Van Gogh began to draw as a child, and he continued to draw throughout the years that led up to his decision to become an artist. He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. His work included self portraits, landscapes, still lifes, portraits and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.

      Van Gogh spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers, traveling between The Hague, London and Paris, after which he taught for a time in England. One of his early aspirations was to become a pastor and from 1879 he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium where he began to sketch people from the local community. In 1885, he painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. His palette at the time consisted mainly of somber earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later work. In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. Later, he moved to the south of France and was influenced by the strong sunlight he found there. His work grew brighter in color, and he developed the unique and highly recognizable style that became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888.

      The extent to which his mental health affected his painting has been a subject of speculation since his death. Despite a widespread tendency to romanticize his ill health, modern critics see an artist deeply frustrated by the inactivity and incoherence brought about by his bouts of illness. According to art critic Robert Hughes, Van Gogh's late works show an artist at the height of his ability, completely in control and "longing for concision and grace". Read more . . .

• Recent news about Vincent Van Gogh
• Vincent van Gogh Gallery. The complete works and letters of Vincent van Gogh.
• Van Gogh Letters – The complete letters of Van Gogh, translated into English and annotated. Published by the Van Gogh Museum.
• Johanna Gesina van Gogh-Bonger, Memoir of Vincent van Gogh
• Memoir of Vincent van Gogh. By Johanna Gesina van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent's sister in law.
• Van Gogh's Letters, unabridged and annotated.
• Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
• Vincent van Gogh at the Museum of Modern Art
• Works by or about Vincent van Gogh in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Van Gogh at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., United States.
• Painted with Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Emile Bernard – Facsimiles at The Morgan Library & Museum
• Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Vincent Van Gogh. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.

Paint a Britto Inspired Vase of Flowers

      Romero Britto (6 October 1963) is a contemporary Brazilian-American Neo-pop artist, painter, serigrapher, and sculptor. He combines elements of cubism, pop art and graffiti painting in his work. Britto has lived in Miami, Florida since 1989. His paintings inspire countless elementary school children in the United States. This is primarily because his subjects are fun and simple and his patterned, colorful surfaces are certainly easy to emulate if you are young and enthusiastic for art! I've included below a couple of bright, still life paintings that hung in a local school art exhibit this spring. These second grade students looked at Britto's imaginative artworks and painted a few of their own based upon his vision.

Child artworks inspired by Romero Britto.

Visit Romero Britto's studio here.

A Complimentary Colored Cubism

A simple complimentary colored cubism project for
 young art students, ideal for students fourth grade
and up.

      Arrange in the center of the classroom a still life that may be viewed in the round. This will enable students to draw it from a wide variety of perspectives. Students should draw their ideas lightly on a heavy piece of white drawing paper with a pencil before deciding upon a design. Encourage your students to walk around the still life and draw parts of it from different view points. Have them draw the elements simply, with basic geometric shapes. After the drawings are done, hand out colored pencils or watercolor trays for the addition of color and pattern. If you wish, you may insist that students choose complimentary colors to complete the assignment. This additional condition helps teachers meet with required standards that teach color combinations from the color wheel.  

      Cubism comes in three stylized types: Protocubism, Analytical Cubism and Synthetical Cubism.

      Protocubism was an intermediary transition phase in the history of art chronologically extending from 1904 to 1910. Evidence suggests that the production of proto-Cubist paintings resulted from a wide-ranging series of experiments, circumstances, influences and conditions, rather than from one isolated static event, trajectory, artist or discourse. With its roots stemming from at least the late 19th century this period can be characterized by a move towards the radical geometrization of form and a reduction or limitation of the color palette (in comparison with Fauvism). It is essentially the first experimental and exploratory phase of an art movement that would become altogether more extreme, known from the spring of 1911 as Cubism.

      Proto-Cubist artworks typically depict objects in geometric schemas of cubic or conic shapes. The illusion of classical perspective is progressively stripped away from objective representation to reveal the constructive essence of the physical world (not just as seen). The term is applied not only to works of this period by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, but to a range of art produced in France during the early 1900s, by such artists as Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, and to variants developed elsewhere in Europe. Proto-Cubist works embrace many disparate styles, and would affect diverse individuals, groups and movements, ultimately forming a fundamental stage in the history of Modern art of the 20th-century.

The synthetical style which developed
out of the two former styles was
characterized by the use of collaged
elements and a looser interpretation
 of the elements being portrayed.
The elements became flatter and
more abstract.

      The term Cubism did not come into general usage until 1911, mainly with reference to Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, and Léger. In 1911, the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire accepted the term on behalf of a group of artists invited to exhibit at the Brussels Indépendants. The following year, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, Metzinger and Gleizes wrote and published Du "Cubisme" in an effort to dispel the confusion raging around the word, and as a major defence of Cubism (which had caused a public scandal following the 1911 Salon des Indépendants and the 1912 Salon d'Automne in Paris). Clarifying their aims as artists, this work was the first theoretical treatise on Cubism and it still remains the clearest and most intelligible. The result, not solely a collaboration between its two authors, reflected discussions by the circle of artists who met in Puteaux and Courbevoie. It mirrored the attitudes of the "artists of Passy", which included Picabia and the Duchamp brothers, to whom sections of it were read prior to publication. The concept developed in Du "Cubisme" of observing a subject from different points in space and time simultaneously, i.e., the act of moving around an object to seize it from several successive angles fused into a single image ('multiple viewpoints' or 'mobile perspective'), is now a generally recognized phenomenon of the Cubist style.

The analytical cubism
describes painted elements
with faceted shapes and was
 most usually painted in
monochromatic colors.

      Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed along with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colors. Both artists took apart objects and "analyzed" them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque’s paintings at this time have many similarities. Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.

More Art Lessons About Cubism:

Cubist Still-life: Hong Wen School
My Cultural Heritage Cubist Portrait Lesson
Cubist Drawings

Arcimboldo Paper Portraits

Vertumnus, a portrait of today. Rudolf II,
 Holy Roman Emperor painted as
 Vertumnus, Roman God of the seasons,
 c. 1590-1. Skokloster Castle, Sweden.

      Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526 or 1527 – July 11, 1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books – that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject.

      His father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist. Like his father, Giuseppe Arcimboldo started his career as a designer for stained glasses and frescoes at local cathedrals when he was 21 years old.

       In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "The Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols.

      Arcimboldo's portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, plants, fruits, sea creatures and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today.

At a distance, his portraits looked like normal human portraits. However, individual objects in each portrait were actually overlapped together to make various anatomical shapes of a human. They were carefully constructed by his imagination. Besides, when he assembled objects in one portrait, he never used random objects. Each object was related by characterization. In The Librarian, Arcimboldo used objects that signified the book culture at that time, such as the curtain that created individual study rooms in a library. The animal tails, which became the beard of the portrait, were used as dusters. By using the everyday objects, the portraits were decoration and still life paintings at the same time. His works showed not only nature and human beings, but also how close they were related.

      After the portrait was released to the public, some scholars, who had a close relationship with the book culture at that time, argued that the portrait ridiculed their scholarship. In fact, Arcimboldo criticized the phenomenon of the rich people’s misbehavior and showed others what happened at that time through his art. In The Librarian, although the painting looked ridiculous, it criticized some wealthy people who collected the books in order to satisfy their ownership, instead of to read the books.

      Art critics debate whether his paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times.

Arcimboldo died in Milan, to which he retired after leaving the Prague service. It was during this last phase of his career that he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II (see above), as well as his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career.

      When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years' War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from Rudolf II's collection.

      His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in   Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris, as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, the Candie Museum in Guernsey and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid also own paintings by Arcimboldo.

Draw Klimt Figures

Klimt tree.

      Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna in Austria-Hungary, the second of seven children—three boys and four girls. His mother, Anna Klimt (née Finster), had an unrealized ambition to be a musical performer. His father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, formerly from Bohemia, was a gold engraver. All three of their sons displayed artistic talent early on. Klimt's younger brothers were Ernst Klimt and Georg Klimt.

      Klimt lived in poverty while attending the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule), where he studied architectural painting until 1883. He revered Vienna's foremost history painter of the time, Hans Makart. Klimt readily accepted the principles of a conservative training; his early work may be classified as academic. In 1877 his brother, Ernst, who, like his father, would become an engraver, also enrolled in the school. The two brothers and their friend, Franz Matsch, began working together and by 1880 they had received numerous commissions as a team that they called the "Company of Artists". They also helped their teacher in painting murals in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Klimt began his professional career painting interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings on the Ringstraße, including a successful series of "Allegories and Emblems".

      In 1888 Klimt received the Golden Order of Merit from Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria for his contributions to murals painted in the Burgtheater in Vienna. He also became an honorary member of the University of Munich and the University of Vienna. In 1892 Klimt's father and brother Ernst both died, and he had to assume financial responsibility for his father's and brother's families. The tragedies also affected his artistic vision and soon he would move towards a new personal style.

      In the early 1890s Klimt met Emilie Louise Flöge who was to be his companion until the end of his life. His painting, The Kiss (1907–08), is thought to be an image of them together. He designed many costumes she created and modeled in his works.

The model on the left is Emilie Floge by Klimt, the model on the right was randomly selected from a magazine, beheaded and pasted onto black paper for this project. Teachers should collect magazines for this exercise and metallic markers. This project is good for many age groups, k-5th.

      Students may select a partial torso or head from a magazine, cut it out and then paste it onto a large piece of black construction paper. Then the teacher can show a power point of a select group of Klimt's works and I mean select. Not all of Klimt's paintings are appropriate for an elementary classroom. Talk to the children about his design choices and how he used color and pattern to define figures. Then pass out those gel pens, metallic markers and brilliant colored pencils that you've been saving for a special drawing project. Students may then design their own patterned surface with these on top of the black paper in order to give their partial figure a completed Klimt like portrait.

More Related Projects:

• Sitting under the tree with Gustav
• Gustav Klimt Art Project
• Elegant Art Nouveau
• Klimt Inspirations
• Klimt Inspired Self Portrait
• More Gustav Klimt Collages
• Building A Klimt

Paint an Abstract Still Life

An abstract still life observed from milk bottles by a third grader.
First students collaged theirpaper with bright colored tissues
and then they added bold, black outlines
while observing milk bottles and other plastic soap containers.

      Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.

More Abstract Still Life Ideas for Art Class:

• Tropical Still Life 
• Oil Pastel Still Life Inspired by Vincent Van Gogh
• More cubist still life in tempera, 3rd grade
• Inspired by the Masters II - Cezanne Still Life

Cut-Out, Paste and Paint a Jim Dine Valentine

This first grader cut and pasted, painted and drew a Valentine collage based upon what she learned about Jim Dine and Pop Art.

      Jim Dine (born June 16, 1935) is an American pop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Walnut Hills High School, the University of Cincinnati, and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with his Happenings. Pioneered with artists Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow, in conjunction with musician John Cage, the "Happenings" were chaotic performance art that was a stark contrast with the more somber mood of the expressionists popular in the New York art world. The first of these was the 30 second The Smiling Worker performed in 1959.

       Above, "Hearts were created by the art students at Barrett Elementary School. They were inspired by the work of artist Jim Dine." Although known for controversial work by adults, young school children are usually introduced to Dine's simple heart 'icon' type prints.

      In 1962 Dine's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Norton Simon Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first "Pop Art" exhibitions in America. These painters started a movement, in a time of social unrest, which shocked America and the Art world and changed modern Art forever, "Pop Art".

      Although Pop Art began in the late 1950s, Pop Art in America was given its greatest impetus during the 1960s. The term "Pop Art" was officially introduced in December 1962; the Occasion was a "Symposium on Pop Art" organized by the Museum of Modern Art. By this time, American advertising had adopted many elements and inflections of modern art and functioned at a very sophisticated level. Consequently, American artists had to search deeper for dramatic styles that would distance art from the well-designed and clever commercial materials. As the British viewed American popular culture imagery from a somewhat removed perspective, their views were often instilled with romantic, sentimental and humorous overtones. By contrast, American artists being bombarded daily with the diversity of mass-produced imagery, produced work that was generally more bold and aggressive.   

More Related Art Projects:

• Waitsfield Elementary Art: Jim Dine Hearts 
• Another Jim Dine Post
• First Grade Hearts after Jim Dine
• Stamped Hearts Art Project