Van Gogh 'Starry Night' in Acrylic and Texture Paste (Adult Class)

My adult class explored the highly complex work of Van Gogh. Their beautiful results led me to try this project with my kids classes too, though in a different medium. See the blog post for my kids' 'Starry Night'.

Teach Sample, acrylic

Materials:
Pencil and ruler for grid method drawing
Acrylic paper or canvas
'Starry Night' print out for each student, in a plastic sleeve and taped to a large yogurt container.
Acrylic paint: black, white, burnt umber, yellow ochre, medium yellow, medium red, dark green, pthalo blue.
Texture paste or modeling paste
Various brushes (small flat, small round, small cat tongue or slanted brush, and large brush for background)


Process:
Students created a grid on their Van Gogh 'Starry Night' print out, and then a grid on their acrylic paper. Using pencil, they then began lightly drawing in the composition grid for grid.

To begin, we painted a light coat of yellow ochre across our whole paper (we could still see our pencil lines through it).

I reinforced the need to closely examine the size and direction of the various line qualities in Van Gogh's painting. With this objective in mind, students were independently on their way.

We painted the bottom half first, starting with the mountains, then the hills and village, and finally the tree. The operative word and function was layering, layering and layering, with small repetitive dashes and strokes. With only one blue color at our disposal, we were forced to mix tints and shades in order to achieve the different range of blues in Van Gogh's work. Tints of yellow were created, as well as tints of greens and green-yellow by mixing. Limiting our palette inevitable extends our learning and my adult students appreciate having to problem solve their way through color mixing.
We regularly mixed a bit of texture paste into our paint for added texture, especially in the sky and wind swirls.

These took nearly three 3-hour classes, and was probably our most challenging project to date. Our wrists we all suffering by the end (seriously, some of us had numbness and tingling in the wrist due to all the minute repetitive motion!). But in the end, we were ALL so pleased and proud. These are beautiful!