Starry Night

As we'd been studying space in science, it seemed a good time to look at a famous painting of the night sky! 

To start off we discussed the painting, thinking especially about how Van Gogh portrayed movement. To help with this, we compared the painting to a photo of star trails and also watched this mesmerising interactive Starry Night (which I came across on Deep Space Sparkle).

We also learned more about Vincent Van Gogh, starting from this fun BBC video clip.

The pictures were made with oil pastels, first drawing black outlines for the 'mountain', hills and buildings, then adding colours to those parts and finally completing the sky. We built up a mix of colours using lines, trying to follow the same direction to achieve a flowing effect.

In the first lesson I thought, 'Agghhh I never knew hills could be so hard to draw!!' but by the end every child had produced a beautiful, and surprisingly individual, piece of art.