Van Gogh Inspired Clay Flowers Still Life

Grade 7-9 students looked at the floral still life paintings by Van Gogh and created these beautiful bouquets from model magic. I found the project inspiration HERE on the Painted Paper blog. 

Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch-born Post-impressionist artist. In his lifetime Van Gogh painted a lot of paintings. Among these were still lifes depicting flowers. Van Gogh loved nature, and flowers offered him the opportunity to portray nature at its best. He often used ordinary flowers that grew in the countryside near his home in southern France as subject matter for many of his flower oil paintings. Although he is most famous for his sunflower paintings, he also painted irises, roses, poppies, cornflowers, daisies, almond blossoms, myositis, and chrysanthemums. With his bold colours and textural brushstrokes, he brought life and emotion to his work, putting his unique perspective on it. 

Students created these mixed media floral arrangements using acrylics, tempera, painted paper, watercolour and Model Magic. 

Van Gogh Roses painting

For a base, we used scrap matboard (the centers leftover from cutting mat frames). 

You can also use foam core. There are around 5 x 7" - 8 x 10".

Using acrylic paint, students painted a base and a sky colour for the background. I encouraged them to mix colours and use loose, textural brushstrokes. Let dry. The boards may warp a bit, so stack heavy books on them overnight.

Using scraps of painted paper, students created a vase. 

Glue stick that to the background. 

I cut the model magic into more individual sized pieces and put them into zip lock bags. Fresh stuff is the best. This lesson took about three weeks, and by the third week, the model magic was really starting to dry out despite being stored in zip locks. So try to get your students to make the flowers in one class. Mine are quite slow, plus lots of absences so it was tricky. 

The flowers will stick onto the background if you push them on hard. 

Otherwise, you can hot glue them on once they're dry. 

Let dry overnight. 

Once dry, paint using watercolours or other paint. 

Paint on leaves and stems or cut them out of green paper and glue them on. 

Some finished works- Grade 7-9. I love them!!