Anthropology sophomore Van Truong recently combined art and biology in an effort to ace her final exam in December. While most of her college mates used lists and flashcards to memorize stuff, Van used a whiteboard to write out all her notes in the form of ‘Starry Night’, Van Gogh’s famous masterpiece. “I knew I had to study for this exam, and I knew I’d be writing on this whiteboard for hours,” she said. “So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I did it in a form where people didn’t know how to feel about it?’” So when she got to Smathers Library on the University of Florida’s Gainesville campus, she started to write down all her notes with the words forming a replica of Van Gogh’s iconic painting. Three hours later, the masterpiece was complete. Read More »

Alex Harrison Parker, an American PHD astronomy student, used computer mosaic-making software to re-produce Van Gogh’s famous Starry Night painting from the most beautiful images captured by the Hubble telescope in the last 20 years. “The idea came up around the time of Hubble’s 22nd birthday, when I thought it would be neat to assemble a collage of a bunch of Hubble images from over its history,” Alex told Discovery News. So he went online, downloaded Hubble’s top 100 pictures and used a mosaic software to create this new take on Van Gogh’s work of art. The passionate astronomer who likes to study the asteroids and proto-planets of the early solar system decided to go ahead with his unique project after cloudy weather prevented him from exploring the real starry night at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read More »

Ever wondered what the sky must have looked like when Vincent Van Gogh painted his famous Starry Night? Well, Alex Cruz has and he even created his own realistic-looking version of the post-impressionist’s masterpiece, using Photoshop. “I’ve often wondered about how the night ski looked to Van Gogh when he painted Starry Night,” Ruiz said. “I wanted this piece to be somewhat magical and fantastic, not just a normal night painting. Hence the large moon, large stars, transparent clouds, etc., yet keeping a mostly realistic feel to it.” I don’t know how long it took the Dutch artist to finish his famous artwork, but Ruiz did his in just 7 hours, using matte painting techniques in Photoshop. Art sure has come a long way since the 1800s. Read More »

This piece of quilled eye candy was created by Susan Myers, of Suzy’s Artsy-Craftsy Sitcom, and it’s not only one of the coolest reproductions of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but one of the most awesome artworks I have ever seen. I wrote a post about the art of quilling some time ago, and it became one of the most popular posts on Oddity Central, so I expect many of you are going to find this particular artwork fascinating. Quilling basically means cutting colorful strips of paper and rolling them with a special tool, but it’s a lot harder than it sounds. Creating advanced shapes out of paper strips and placing them in the right position requires genuine skill. Susan Myers is an artist with a mission – to complete one of her UFOs (Unfinished Objects) every month. In the month of June she worked on a quilled replica of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, one of the most famous paintings in the world, and finally managed to finish it in late July. But noticing the attention to detail in her work it’s easy to understand why it took her a little longer than planned. She started her masterpiece by drawing the basic outline with a white-color pencil on a large sheet of thick blue cardstock. Then she grabbed her quilling tool, a paper cutter and colored cardstock and the rest is history. Read More »

So what do you do when you have plenty of time and bacon on your hands? That’s an easy one, try to recreate some of the world’s most popular paintings.

At least that’s what Instructables user CooperTwist decided to do. He used one package of turkey bacon, two packages of regular bacon, a sharp knife, and two cutting boards, one for actual cutting, and the larger one as a canvas for his bacon masterpiece. He began by cutting the bacon into long strips, according to their color and ended up with five piles of goodness: light turkey bacon, dark turkey bacon, red bacon, pink bacon, and white bacon fat.

He then printed aversion of the original Starry Night and tried to focus on the things that stand out and make it unique: the swirling cloud, the tall village church and the dark treetop in the foreground. He used whole strips for the clouds and cut smaller pieces for the details around the village.

Van Gogh’s Starry Night was also recently recreated with 8,000 bottle caps, by two students from the University of Virginia.

Read More »

Two students from the University of Virginia have created a pixelated replica of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” using around 8,000 colorful bottle caps.

I don’t know how they got their hands on so many bottle caps, but I’m sure Ross Thomas and Elizabeth Farrell made quite an impression on their teachers and colleagues when they unveiled this recycled version of Starry Night. Around 8,000 bottle caps were used to complete the 7′ by 9′ masterpiece, but although the number itself is pretty impressive, what I find most amazing is how they used the colors and logos of the caps in just the right places to create a beautiful artwork.

I don’t know what it is about Van Gogh’s masterpiece that bottle cap artists love so much, but I think it just might be the most bottle cap reproduced artwork in history. Take a look at some other versions of Starry Night, at the bottom.

Read More »