Van Gogh Sunflowers Art Lesson

A perennial favorite...what student can go through elementary school without completing his own version of Van Gogh's Sunflowers?

I usually do a collection of Sunflowers in oil pastel, but decide to try out a tempera paint version instead.

Here's what we did:

Using an oil pastel, students drew a vase, table line and the flower centers. I demonstrated this step first and gave all sorts of examples to encourage students to create a vase and flowers unique to them.

Then, students painted the "tables" in one color and the background in another color. For simplicity, I set out two colors. You may not choose to limit the kids this way, though.

This usually marked the end of our first lesson (approx. 45 minutes). For the next step, I set out an assortment of paints and demonstrated how to blend paint using the double-load technique. (dip paint brush first in one color and then another. Mix directly onto paper).

After painting the leaves and petals, children painted their vase and added shadows and hi-lights. Some children added shadows to the table as well. For a final flourish, the children opted to outline their lines with black or white paint or not at all. I left that decision up to them.

Second and Third Grade Results:

Van Gogh Sunflower Art Lesson in Oil Pastel

I was looking through my archives from last year and came upon these beautiful sunflower drawings. This is a lesson I usually do with my third graders. We study, of course, Van Gogh's famous Sunflower series by looking at how he created the sunflowers, vase and even his name.

The children start off with an 12" x 18" light blue colored paper. If you don't have lengthy art classes, I suggest you trim the paper to a 10" x 15" size. A bit more manageable for artists who need longer to color their work.
I instruct the kids to draw the vase first (sides and bottoms only) then the centers of the flowers. Some centers are round, some are oval, some are little balls. The petals, leaves and stems come next. Last is the table line.
Using a variety of oil pastels (I don't limit them to the colors Van Gogh uses) the kids color away. This takes time and I keep encouraging the kids to color all the blue paper away. This takes some prodding for some kids who want to finis fast, but this lesson really looks wonderful when the kids put in the effort. The last stage 9and some of my students take a while before reaching this stage ) is to add a black line around every petal, leaf, flower center, and vase. Worth it, I think!


(Students from Foothill School 2006)




(Joyce from Mountain View 2006)