Customer Reviews

Color Your Own Van Gogh Paintings (Dover Art Coloring Book)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Color Your Own VAN GOGH Paintings" is a great way to introduce children to a famous painter. As an elementary art teacher (grades K-6), I'm always looking for creative ways to introduce famous painters and techniques to students. This book will be a great asset to the Van Gogh study I introduce to the kindergarten class. We currently read "Camille and the Sunflowers", a book about Van Gogh, and then do a Van Gogh-like sunflower painting. This book will give them another look at Van Gogh's work... and THEY get to give his pictures life by coloring them in! There are 30 meticulously rendered black-and-white drawings of some of his masterpieces. (Also included are the 30 accompanying full-color illustrations depicted on the covers!)

I was looking for a good "adult therapy" style coloring book, and this is exactly what I was hoping for. Since I can't draw, I satisfy my creative yearning with coloring. The pictures have a enough detail to be absorbing, but not so much detail as to be tedious. The paper and granularity of the drawings are perfect for crayons, which I prefer over markers or pencil. My husband still teases me for playing with crayons, but at least my subjects are adult now.

I am a fan of this series of books, and especially appreciate their utility in introducing great art to children and young adults. I am a great admirer of Vincent van Gogh, and have always appreciated his unique style and especially his brushwork. In my mind his use of dynamic brushstrokes and bright contrasting colors defines impressionism for all time. The problem, of course, is that these characteristics are impossible to reproduce in a coloring book or paint-by-numbers book of any sort.

While I prefer the abstract coloring books from the same series, I recognize that impressionism is more difficult to reproduce than the (generally) hard-lined linearity inherent in abstract art. While I considered giving this book four stars due to the impossibilities in reproducing a van Gogh masterpiece, I elected to give it five because of the educational and inspirational value that exposing people to these great works intrinsically has.

The book is well printed, and comes with a nice color guide for rendering the individual pieces. It is a bargain, and is a great, interactive way to introduce kids (or adults new to van Gogh, for that matter) to the work of the master impressionist.

This is a great coloring book for adults. I use it as a time to just do something a little mindless. Its a nice change to have a book like this that isn't a bunch of cartoons intended for 5 year olds.

As an art student finishing her Bachelor's degree, I have purchased this as a way to study his line work. I have always admired Van Gogh, have many of the prints on my wall, but my goal was to study his lines and how his process to achieving a finish drawing was.


This book is a must have on any art student's library. You will get most of the master's famous work and have it for years. It's so relaxing and you can learn a lot from it.

The way I use is this:

I photocopy it, then use on my sketchbook because it does have drawings on both sides,you want to make sure you don't color it right on the book so that you can use other times.

I also use transfer paper, when I don't have the time to xerox it. Always have sharp points and Prismacolor pencil is the best to achieve the bright tones. Happy Drawing everybody. =)

I find that colouring relaxes me when I'm feeling unfocussed, so from time to time I colour. This product was too simplistic for me - not enough definition in the painting renditions. The Anatomy Colouring Book is more up my alley

I think we can all agree that, although he depicted some perfectly pleasant scenes of quaint countryside and rural life, Van Gogh's approach to paint application and colour was way off. How many times did he spoil, say, a nice waving wheat scene with turmultuous swirling colours, giving a dark psychological insight into a tormented psyche, at odds with the scene depicted? He couldn't even paint a nice starry sky without expressing through colour, texture and dynamic motion a radical and unique vision of personal torment, at odds with the artistic conventions of the time. This book, then, is a godsend; a chance to rectify Van Gogh's stylistic mistakes in the area of colour application, while retaining the charming scenes of the French countryside.
A word of warning, however: this book is really not suitable for children or similarly impressionable people. I gave it to a young nephew who, after spending quite some time colouring in the nice birds over the wheat field, cut his ear off!