Vincent Van Gogh
With his bright colours and bold shapes, Van Gogh is an artist whose paintings are both accessible and
appealing to children. Even young children can try painting and drawing in the style of Van Gogh – and
his familiar, everyday subject matter makes a good starting point for a wide range of different activities.
Continental Café
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
Making Relationships
Show the children Van Gogh’s 1888 painting ‘Café Terrace at Night’, ‘Van Gogh’s paintings’. Tell the
children the name of the painting, and talk about how we know that it’s a night time painting. Look at the
tables and chairs, arranged outside the café on the terrace. Can the children spot the customers sitting at the
tables, and the waiter with his white apron?
Visit a real café with small groups of children, or create your own role play café in your setting –. Think of
a name for your café and make it attractive with table cloths, small vases of flowers, cups and saucers and
napkins. Choose food with a continental flavour, such as cut-up croissants and platters of fruit. Provide
white aprons for the waiters and waitresses, a pencil and pad for taking orders and writing bills, play
money, a cash till and a tip jar. Put out just a couple of tables so that the café is not overwhelmed. Monitor
carefully to make sure no child eats too much and offer every child the chance to be both a waiter and a
customer.
Can I take your picture, please?
Communication and Language
Understanding
Look at some Van Gogh portraits, such as his 1890 portrait ‘Peasant Girl in a Straw Hat’, his 1888 portrait
of the postman Joseph Roulin and his 1888 portrait ‘Girl with Ruffled Hair’. Explain to the children that a
portrait is a picture of a person.
Look at the appearance of the person in the portrait – their hair colour, their eye colour, their size. Does the
person look happy, sad, kind, cross, scary? Does the portrait show just the face and shoulders or the whole
body?
Look at the colours Van Gogh used. Look at the background and see if you can spot his characteristically
thick brush strokes. Explain to the children that the picture they are looking at is a reproduction – not the
original picture that Van Gogh painted. Show the children different prints of the same portrait, so they can
see how the colours vary a little in each version.
Help the children to take portrait photos of each other. With the children, decorate some large sheets of
paper to pin up on the wall as a background. Choose brightly coloured paint and techniques to create
striking patterns, such as handprints, sponge painting, and dripping and dribbling paint directly from the
bottle. You can also use patterned cloths and wallpaper. Let the children choose the background they want.
Look again at Van Gogh’s portraits for inspiration, and encourage the children to try different poses and
facial expressions.
Patterns and pencil effects
Physical Development
Moving and Handling
Give the children lots of opportunity to draw freely, and as they become ready, introduce different pencil
techniques:
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pressing hard with the pencil to make a darker mark
pressing lightly to make a fainter mark
short and long pencil strokes
wavy lines
zigzags
pencil strokes side by side (called ‘hatching’)
criss-crosses (called ‘cross-hatching’)
dots and splodges
spirals and curls
rubbing an area of soft pencil (B or 2B) with cotton wool to create a shadowy effect
Harvest time
Mathematics
Shape, Space and Measure
Look at some of Van Gogh’s landscape paintings, including his 1888 painting ‘The Harvest’, ‘Van Gogh’s
paintings’. Explain to the children that a landscape picture shows the countryside and talk about the
children’s own experiences of the countryside. Look at the fields, the trees, the hedgerows, the sky and
other details in the picture. Talk about their shapes and look at the natural, countryside colours in the
painting. Make your own big landscape picture, inspired by the colours, composition and textured patterns
in Van Gogh’s harvest painting. Start off by creating some paint patterns, using shades of green, yellow
and brown and working on coloured paper rather than white. Choose techniques to create textured effects:
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sponge painting
stippling with a thick brush
wood block printing – stick textured substances such as corrugated card onto wooden blocks
potato printing – cut textured patterns into the surface of the potato and cut two wedges into the
dome of the potato to make a handle
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painting lines, dabs and splodges
mixing up paint and flour and making patterns in the pasty paint with a cardboard comb
spraying paint – use a plant mister or dip a nail brush in paint and draw a blunt knife towards you
over the bristles, so the paint sprays across the paper
Look at the strips of yellow corn, fencing and hedgerow in Van Gogh’s harvest painting. Cut your paint
patterns into rectangular strips and stick them onto a blue background to create a textured landscape pattern
– similar to Van Gogh. Van Gogh also loved painting huge bright suns. If you want to add a sun to your
landscape, use his 1888 painting ‘The Sower’ for inspiration and paint a large card circle with textured
yellow pasty paint to stick in the sky.
Rooms in a house
Understanding the World
The World
Look at Van Gogh’s 1888 painting ‘Bedroom in Arles’, ‘Van Gogh’s paintings’. Point out the familiar
furniture and encourage the children to identify it – the bed, the table, the chairs, the towel hanging on a
hook, the pictures on the wall.
Encourage the children to talk about their own bedrooms. What furniture do they have in their bedrooms?
Talk about some of the differences between their bedrooms and Van Gogh’s bedroom. With older children,
look at the big jug and bowl for washing hands and faces. Talk about how the painting was made a long
time ago, before houses had washbasins and taps.
Gather some dolls’ house furniture and pictures of furniture. Talk about, name and explore the items. Sort
the items into ‘rooms’ – starting off with the bedroom to link with Van Gogh’s painting. Discuss where the
children want to place items such as chairs, and tables, which can go in most rooms. Sponge paint a large
rectangle of card with yellow paint and a trapezium with red paint to make a house with a roof. Stick on
five rectangles of card to represent the bedroom, the bathroom, the sitting room, the dining room and the
kitchen. Sort pictures of furniture cut from a catalogue and stick onto the corresponding ‘room’.
Sunflowers
Expressive Arts and Design
Exploring and Using Media and Materials
Look at Van Gogh’s famous ‘Sunflowers’ painting, ‘Van Gogh’s paintings’. Help the children to notice the
shapes and colours in the picture. Point out that some of the sunflowers are fresh blooms, some have lost
their petals and some appear dead. Look at the shiny light reflected on the curved body of the vase. With
older children, point out Van Gogh’s name on the vase – and explain that this tells us who painted the
picture.
If possible, show the children some real sunflowers, and some sunflower seeds. Explain that when a
sunflower looks dead, the seeds can be gathered from the centre of the flower. Let each child draw a big
sunflower shape on a circular piece of card. Mix orange and yellow paint with flour to make pasty paint,
and let the children paint their sunflowers. Encourage them to explore making the paint textured with glue
spatulas, blunt knives and fingers – just like Van Gogh. Cut out smaller circles of card, cover with PVA
glue, sprinkle with sunflower seeds and stick to the centre of the flowers. Cut out a big vase shape and add
the flowers to make a group ‘Sunflowers’ picture, inspired by Van Gogh.
Extension activities
Café menus
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
With the children, create a menu for your café. Check out the menu if you visit a real café with the
children or bring some menu’s in. Talk about the reason for having a menu and what information the menu
should include. Decide whether the menu should be a folded sheet or a single sheet, and where on the menu
the café name should go. Let the children draw pictures and take photos to add to the menu. Type up the
menu on the computer and scan in the children’s pictures. Ask the children to help you choose fonts and
colours. Save the file so that new menus can be printed out when the food in the café changes, or the menu
gets tatty.
Self portraits
Communication and Language
Look at some of Van Gogh’s many self portraits and talk about his appearance and facial expression. If you
include a portrait with his bandaged head, explain that he had hurt his ear when he painted that particular
portrait. Take photos of the children and set up mirrors, and let them draw their own self portraits.
Encourage them to look carefully at themselves. Talk about hair colour, skin colour and eye colour and
make sure they have appropriate coloured pencils. Which do they find works best, looking at a photo or
looking in a mirror?
Landscape patterns
Mathematics
Ask the children to help you cut the paint patterns into lots of different shapes, including circles, squares,
triangles, rectangles, trapeziums and random shapes. Use the shapes to create collages. The collages can be
abstract, patterns or representative. As the children work on their collages, help them to identify and name
the different shapes.
What kind of chair?
Understanding the World
Look again at the chair, the table and the bed in Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom. With the children, go
through furniture catalogues, cutting out pictures of chairs, tables and beds. Make sure there are lots of
different types – a dining room chair, an armchair, a rocking chair, a stool, a garden chair, a deck chair; a
dining room table, a kitchen table, a coffee table, a bedside table, a desk, a garden table; a single bed, a
double bed, bunk beds, a cot, a dog’s bed. Sort through the pictures, putting them in groups and talking
about the purpose of each type of chair, table or bed.
Still life
Expressive Arts and Design
Look at some of Van Gogh’s ‘still life’ paintings and explain that a still life is a picture of something that
we use or look at. Gather some interesting objects and let the children choose three objects to arrange,
observe and draw or paint. If children are not yet drawing representative images, let them choose three
pictures. Help them to cut out, arrange and stick the images onto a decorated background (see ‘Harvest
Time’ for some ideas for decorating the background).
Dear Parent,
Each term we will be looking at different artists. Between now and the end of December we will look at
our first artist is Vincent Van Gogh. To encourage the children to talk about what they have done at PreSchool we have provided below some ideas for you to do with your child at home to support their learning
of this great artist. Below are some of the pictures we will be looking at and we will put them on the
website over the next couple of weeks so you can look at them with your child.
Café Terrace at Night
‘The Harvest’
Sunflowers
Postman Joseph Roulin
‘Bedroom in Arles’
Look at some of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings on the internet or in library books. Explain to your child
that Van Gogh used dabs of paint to make his paintings. Give your child bright colours and coloured paper
and show them how to make single, separate dabs with their paint brush. Let them try out this style of
painting so they can make pictures like Van Gogh – but don’t worry if they just want to paint in their own
way. Enjoying the activity with you is the most important thing!
Look at Van Gogh’s famous painting of his bedroom in Arles and talk about the furniture in the picture.
Draw and cut out a big house shape and divide it into rectangles to represent different rooms (sitting room,
kitchen, bedroom and so on). Let your child decorate the house shape if they wish. Go through furniture
catalogues with your child, cutting out furniture to stick onto each ‘room’.
Look at some of Van Gogh’s portraits and explain to your child that a portrait is a picture of somebody. If
you have a camera, help your child to take portrait photos of their family and friends. Can they experiment
with different poses and facial expressions? Mount the photos and put them on the wall to make a portrait
gallery. Older children can also paint and draw their portraits.
Look at Van Gogh’s painting ‘Café Terrace at Night’ and talk about it with your child. Set up your own
play café at home, with a table and chair, plates, cups and saucers, play money and real food. Make your
own menu for the café. Take it in turns with your child to be the customer and the waiter.
Look at Van Gogh’s famous ‘Sunflowers’ painting. Help your child to draw some big flower shapes on
card and decorate them with yellow and orange paint. If you can get some sunflower seeds, glue a few to
the centre of the flowers. Cut out the sunflowers, paint and cut out a big vase and stick them to a
background to make your own sunflower painting – inspired by Van Gogh!