Color Your Own Van Gogh Paintings (Coloring Books)

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Summary: Color Your Own VAN GOGH Paintings
Review: "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!)

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Summary: Color your own Van Gogh Paintings at your own kitchen table
Review: As this book points out, Vincent van Gogh's individualized style was defined by expressive brushwork, an intense emotionality, and the heightened use of color. The 30 Van Gogh masterpieces rendered by Marty Noble in this Color Your Own Art Masterpieces coloring book obviously lose out on the expressive brushwork, but you have your own chance to add the other two qualities when your color these yourself. You can either copy the originals that are shown in color on the back cover or you can pick your own palette. My preference is for the latter, not only because I do not think they make a collection of crayons big enough to really do justice to the originals, but also because these are IMPRESSIONIST paintings and I ascribe to the idea that your impressions are just as valid as van Gogh in this regard. Noble's renderings are okay (I think there are inherent limitations to line drawings of these works), which means they look more like standard coloring book drawings than black and white reproductions of van Gogh's masterpieces, which includes "Sunflowers," "Starry Night," "The Church at Awers," and even "Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe." But they are just so much fun to color and there is still something to be said for doing such things by hand instead of using your computer. I would look elsewhere to provide youngsters with an introduction to Vincent van Gogh's life and art, but "Color Your Own Van Gogh Paintings" is a nice little way of letting them explore impressionist art.

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Summary: Good adult therapy
Review: 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.