Van Gogh’s paintings are easy to recognize from across a room: swirling skies, thick ridges of paint, yellows that seem to vibrate against blues. What is less obvious is that almost every one of those effects comes from a small set of repeatable decisions about color, brushwork and paint thickness. Learn those decisions and you can borrow his visual language for your own subjects.
Quick answer: To paint like Van Gogh, work with thick, buttery paint (oils or heavy body acrylics), apply it in short, directional strokes that follow the form of each object, and build the picture from bold complementary pairs such as blue and orange or yellow and violet. Outline key shapes in dark blue or a darker hue, leave little or no smooth blending, and let every stroke stay visible. Speed and confidence matter more than precision.
This guide breaks down how to paint like Van Gogh step by step: the materials that make his textures possible, the color logic behind his palettes, the stroke vocabulary he used, and a full practice exercise. If you would rather start with a curated set of paints, canvas and a reference image already matched to his style, our guide to the best Van Gogh inspired painting kits compares the options worth considering.
What Style of Painting Is Van Gogh?
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is classed as a Post-Impressionist. He absorbed the broken color and outdoor light of the Impressionists after moving to Paris in 1886, but pushed past them toward expression. Where an Impressionist tried to record what light looked like at a given moment, Van Gogh tried to record what a scene felt like.
That shift explains most of his technique. He exaggerated color, simplified shapes and made his brushwork visible on purpose, because the marks themselves carried emotion. His later work strongly influenced Expressionism and Fauvism, which took the same freedom with color even further.
Several sources fed his style:
- Japanese woodblock prints: flat areas of color, strong outlines, high horizons and cropped compositions. He collected hundreds of these prints in Paris.
- Neo-Impressionism: the dotted, divided color of Seurat and Signac taught him to place pure colors side by side rather than mixing them into mud.
- Delacroix’s color theory: he wrote often about complementary contrasts, which he studied through Delacroix’s work.
- Dutch realism and Millet: his early Dutch paintings, such as The Potato Eaters (1885), are dark and earthy, showing the tonal foundation he started from.
What Makes Van Gogh Paintings Special
Before picking up a brush, it helps to name the specific qualities you are trying to reproduce. Copying “the look” in general tends to produce a vague swirl. Targeting these features produces something recognizably his.
| Feature | What it looks like | How to get it |
|---|---|---|
| Impasto | Raised ridges of paint that catch light | Thick paint, loaded brush, minimal thinning |
| Directional strokes | Marks that wrap around forms or flow like currents | Plan stroke direction for each area before painting |
| Complementary color | Yellow stars on blue sky, orange hair on blue background | Pair opposites on the color wheel in neighboring areas |
| Outlines | Dark contour lines around trees, figures, buildings | Prussian or ultramarine blue lines, laid in early or late |
| Rhythm | Repeated marks that create movement across the canvas | Reuse the same stroke shape within one area |
| Speed | Fresh, unfussy surface | Work wet-into-wet in one or two sessions |
What Did Van Gogh Use to Paint?
Van Gogh painted mainly in oil, using commercially made tube paints, hog-bristle brushes and, at times, a palette knife. He often bought primed canvas by the roll and, in Arles, also painted on coarser jute. He drew with graphite, chalk, charcoal and reed pens cut from local reeds. Many of his paintings were completed in a single session outdoors, which favored a direct, wet-into-wet approach.
You do not need historical materials to get the effect. What you need is paint with enough body to hold a stroke. Here is a practical modern setup:
- Paint: artist or student oils, or heavy body acrylics. Fluid acrylics and craft paints are too thin and will level out.
- Texture medium (acrylics): a gel medium or modeling paste stretched into your colors bulks them up so ridges stand without using huge amounts of pigment.
- Brushes: stiff synthetic or hog-bristle filberts and flats, sizes 4 to 12. Soft brushes collapse under thick paint.
- Palette knife: a small trowel-shaped knife for mixing and for occasional thick passages.
- Surface: stretched canvas or canvas board, 11×14 or 16×20 inches is a comfortable starting size. Very small canvases make broad strokes hard.
- Retarder (acrylics only): slows drying so strokes can sit side by side and blend slightly at the edges.
Whatever you choose, buy more white than any other color. Thick, opaque passages use it up quickly, and running short mid-painting tempts you to thin the remaining paint.
Oils or acrylics?
Oils give the most authentic result because they stay workable for hours and keep the exact shape of each stroke. Acrylics dry in minutes, which can make it difficult to lay wet strokes against each other, but they are cheaper, have no solvents and dry quickly enough to stack impasto layers in one day. If you choose acrylics, mix in a retarder and work in smaller sections.
Van Gogh’s Color Palette and How to Build It
His Paris and Arles paintings rely on a fairly short list of colors that were new or newly affordable in the 1880s: chrome yellows, cobalt and ultramarine blues, Prussian blue, emerald green and viridian, vermilion, red lakes, red ochre, and lead and zinc whites. Some of those pigments are now restricted or replaced because of toxicity or poor lightfastness.
A safe modern equivalent palette looks like this:
- Cadmium yellow light or a hansa yellow (for his lemon and chrome yellows)
- Cadmium yellow deep or a yellow-orange
- Cadmium red or a pyrrole red (for vermilion)
- Quinacridone rose or crimson (for the pinks and lake reds)
- Ultramarine blue
- Cobalt blue or cerulean hue
- Phthalo blue (a strong stand-in for Prussian blue)
- Viridian or phthalo green
- Yellow ochre
- Titanium or zinc white, plenty of it
Notice what is missing: black. Van Gogh used black far less in his mature work than in his early Dutch paintings. Dark passages are usually deep blues, greens or violets. Leaving black off your palette is one of the quickest ways to push your work toward his look.
The complementary pairs
He thought in pairs. Choose one pair as the backbone of each painting:
- Yellow and violet: wheat fields against lilac skies, sunflowers against blue-violet walls.
- Blue and orange: night skies with orange lamplight, self-portraits with orange beards on blue grounds.
- Red and green: his night café interiors use these to create tension.
Place the pair next to each other in the same zone of the canvas. The edge where they meet is where the color seems to vibrate.
Van Gogh Painting Techniques: The Stroke Vocabulary
Look closely at any of his canvases and you will see that he did not use one swirl everywhere. He used a set of distinct marks, each matched to a type of surface. Practicing them separately on scrap canvas makes the full painting much easier.
- Dashes: short, straight strokes about the length of a fingertip. Used for fields, grass and walls. Lay them side by side in parallel rows, changing angle slightly from row to row.
- Commas: a stroke that starts with pressure and lifts off into a tail. Good for foliage, flowers and hair.
- Swirls and arcs: long curving strokes laid in concentric bands. These are the sky marks in The Starry Night (1889). Build them in rings of slightly different values.
- Flame strokes: wavy vertical marks that taper upward, used for cypress trees.
- Dots and stipples: from his Paris period, when he experimented with pointillist ideas. Useful for backgrounds.
- Contour lines: thin lines of dark blue that define edges, applied with the tip of a round brush.
The rule that ties them together: the stroke direction describes the form. Strokes on a round vase curve around it. Strokes on a road run toward the vanishing point. Strokes in a sky follow the movement you want the viewer to feel.
Loading the brush correctly
Most failed attempts come from too little paint. Scoop paint onto the brush so it sits on both sides of the bristles. Lay the stroke once with steady pressure and lift away. Do not go back over it. Each stroke should be finished in a single movement; reworking flattens the ridge and muddies the color.
Paint Like Van Gogh Tutorial: A Starry Sky Study
This exercise uses a simple night landscape so you can practice swirls, flames and dashes in one painting. Allow two to three hours with oils, or work in sections with acrylics.
Materials
- 11×14 inch canvas
- Ultramarine, phthalo blue, cobalt or cerulean, yellow light, yellow deep, yellow ochre, white, viridian, a touch of crimson
- Filbert brushes sizes 4, 8 and 12; a small round for outlines
- Palette knife and paper towels
Steps
- Tone the canvas. Brush a thin wash of ultramarine over the whole surface and let it dry. This stops white canvas from flashing between strokes.
- Sketch the big shapes. With a thin dark blue, draw a low horizon, a few rolling hills, a cypress shape rising on one side and the positions of a crescent moon and four or five stars.
- Mix sky values. Prepare four piles: deep ultramarine with a little phthalo, mid blue (ultramarine plus white), light blue (cerulean plus white) and a pale blue-white. Keep them separate.
- Paint the stars first. Load yellow light thickly and lay small circles of radiating dashes for each star and the moon. Add a ring of pale yellow-white around each.
- Build the sky in bands. Starting around each star, lay concentric arcs alternating mid and light blues. Away from the stars, run long horizontal swirls with the deepest blue. Let neighboring strokes touch but not blend.
- Add the cypress. Mix viridian with ultramarine and a touch of crimson for a deep green-black. Lay flame strokes upward from the base, overlapping the sky. Add a few lighter green strokes on one side.
- Paint the hills and village. Use horizontal dashes of mid blue and green for hills. Block small houses with dashes of ochre and blue, and add tiny yellow dots for lit windows.
- Outline. With the small round and dark blue, draw contours around the hills, houses and cypress. Keep lines loose and slightly broken.
- Final accents. Add the thickest highlights last: pure yellow in the star centers and a few white strokes in the sky bands. Then stop. Overworking is the main risk now.
How to Paint Like Van Gogh with Your Own Subjects
Copying his famous images is excellent practice, but the real goal is applying his method to your own scenes. Try these translations:
- Your kitchen table: treat it like his bedroom painting. Tilt the perspective slightly, outline objects and use flat, bright fields of color.
- A local park: dashes for grass, commas for leaves, a violet shadow under each tree against yellow-green grass.
- A street at dusk: blue-violet sky, orange shop lights, reflections laid in vertical strokes on the pavement.
- A self-portrait or pet: a background of directional strokes in the complement of the main color of the face or fur.
Pre-matched kits remove much of the guesswork here because the paints and reference are already balanced for his palette. If that suits how you learn, our comparison of Van Gogh painting kits for different skill levels covers what each type includes.
What Paintings Did Van Gogh Paint? Good Ones to Study
He produced around 860 oil paintings in roughly a decade. These are especially useful as study references because each highlights a different technique:
| Painting | Year / place | What to study |
|---|---|---|
| The Potato Eaters | 1885, Nuenen | His early dark, tonal palette |
| Sunflowers series | 1888–1889, Arles | Yellow-on-yellow value control, thick petals |
| The Bedroom | 1888, Arles | Flat color, tilted perspective, outlines |
| Café Terrace at Night | 1888, Arles | Blue and orange contrast, night without black |
| The Starry Night | 1889, Saint-Rémy | Swirling sky strokes, cypress flame marks |
| Irises | 1889, Saint-Rémy | Outlines and Japanese-print influence |
| Wheatfield with Crows | 1890, Auvers | Fast, broken dashes and dramatic sky |
What Inspired Van Gogh to Paint?
Van Gogh came to painting relatively late, around age 27, after working as an art dealer, teacher and lay preacher. His letters to his brother Theo show that he saw painting as a way to express sympathy for ordinary people and for nature. Peasant life, the Provençal countryside, sunflowers and night skies all carried personal meaning for him.
That matters for technique. His intensity of color and stroke grew from wanting to convey feeling, not from a formula. When you paint in his style, choose subjects that mean something to you. The brushwork tends to come alive when the subject does.
Common Mistakes When Painting in Van Gogh’s Style
- Thin paint: the strokes flatten and the work looks like an illustration of a Van Gogh rather than a painting. Use more paint or add gel medium.
- Blending: smoothing transitions destroys the broken-color effect. Put strokes side by side instead.
- Swirls everywhere: if the ground, trees and sky all swirl the same way, the image loses structure. Match the stroke to the surface.
- Muddy color: mixing complements together on the canvas makes gray-brown. Keep them adjacent, not mixed.
- Using black for darks: dark blues and violets keep the picture luminous.
- Dirty brushes: wipe the brush between colors, especially when moving from blue to yellow.
Tips by Skill Level
Beginners
Start with a stroke sampler: divide a canvas board into six squares and fill each with one stroke type. Then try a single sunflower or a small night sky before tackling a full composition.
Intermediate painters
Do a master copy at a modest size, matching stroke direction as closely as you can. Then paint the same scene from your own photo using his method. Comparing the two shows what you have absorbed.
Advanced painters
Experiment with toned grounds in the complement of your dominant color, and try finishing a painting in one sitting outdoors the way he often did. Time pressure forces decisive strokes.
FAQs
What did Van Gogh use to paint?
He used oil paints from tubes, stiff hog-bristle brushes, palette knives at times, and canvas that was often bought in rolls. In Arles he also painted on jute. For drawings he used pencil, chalk, charcoal and reed pens.
Can I paint like Van Gogh with acrylics?
Yes. Use heavy body acrylics, add a gel medium for thickness and a retarder to slow drying. Work in smaller areas so strokes stay wet long enough to sit together.
Why are Van Gogh’s paintings so thick?
He applied paint straight from the tube with a loaded brush and rarely reworked a stroke, leaving raised ridges called impasto. This made his brushwork visible and gave the surface physical energy.
What colors did Van Gogh use most?
Yellows and blues dominate his mature work, supported by greens, oranges, violets and whites. He relied heavily on complementary pairs and used little black after his Dutch period.
How long does it take to learn Van Gogh painting techniques?
The basic strokes can be learned in a few practice sessions. Combining them confidently into a full painting usually takes several attempts. Regular short studies help more than one long effort.
Is a paint-by-numbers kit a good way to learn his style?
It can help with composition and color placement, but most paint-by-numbers kits encourage flat filling rather than textured strokes. Use one as a guide, then apply thicker paint with directional strokes on top.
Final Thoughts
Painting like Van Gogh comes down to four habits: thick paint, strokes that describe form, complementary color pairs and the confidence to leave each mark alone. Practice the stroke types separately, then combine them in a simple night sky or field study before moving to your own subjects. When you are ready to get the right paints and a matched reference in one box, start with our roundup of the top Van Gogh inspired kits for 2026.
