Tutorial the Starry Night Paper Quilling

Who doesn't like The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh?

"A painting of a scene at night with 10 swirly stars, Venus, and a bright yellow crescent moon. In the background, there are hills, in the middle ground there is a moonlit town with a church that has an elongated steeple, and in the foreground, there is the dark green silhouette of a cypress tree and houses." (Learn more about the painting)

Personally, I really love this painting. It gives me a calming sensation whenever I saw this painting. In this instructable, I am going to show you how I made The Starry Night with paper strips (because I'm not friendly with brush, canvas and paint :D).

I made this project using a shape of popsicle because I'm making paper quilling popsicle series.

In this project I used:

a. PVAc glue or wood glue

b. Eraser

c. Pencil

d. A pair of scissors. I preferred a mini-sized one

e. Glue applicator. I made my own glue applicator using a mineral water straw. You can also use a toothpick

f. Forceps

9 color of paper strips as you can see in the picture and also a lot of patience

Let's have fun!

In this project, I used 80 gsm white paper in the form of popsicle as a base. I drew a fine basic line of The Starry Night.

Tips: Other than hand sketching, you can print the design using a free sketch of The Starry Night on the internet. Don't forget to adjust the size, and then set the color to faint grey so that the line won't stand out terribly if you miss the line.

I started the quilling session with gluing down white paper strips along the edge of the base paper. How I glued the paper strips? There are so many ways to glue the paper strips, but personally, I apply a little amount of glue using glue applicator on the edge of base paper, then put the white paper strip on it (same technique as in the third picture in this step).

Next one is the biggest object in The Starry Night, the Cypress tree.

Colors I used: 9 & 10. I glued down the brown paper strips along the line of the cypress tree.

After the basic shape of the cypress tree, I made 2 loose coils for the tree. I rolled the paper strip using my fingers and kept the edge aligned. Once I reached the end of the strip, I loosen the coil. I added a teensy amount of glue under the end and hold it down until it sticks. The last step is to pinch the edge of the coil as you can see in the last picture. Then I arranged the paper strips no 9 and 10 to fully filled the cypress tree shape.

For the sky objects, especially those round-shaped objects, I used several mixed colors of paper strips: 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6. I made a tight coil by rolling the paper strips with my fingers and then applied a little glue at the tip to secure it.

The moon is a little bit different. The paper strips used were: 4, 3 and 2. The first step was gluing down the paper strip no. 4 along the line of the crescent moon. Then I arranged the paper strips with the same color to fully filled the moon shape. Tips: I arranged the strips for the moon as neat as possible because if there is space between the strips, the moon would look a little bit gloomier than the actual paper color (because of the shadow between strips).

After that, I made a loose coil using paper no. 3 and placed it near the moon (see picture). After that surround the moon and coil with paper no. 3. In this part, I suggest arranging the paper strips not too tight or close, to add some space between paper strips (to add a little van Gogh's style, I guess :>). And then continue to surround the moon with paper no. 2 with the same technique.

Just like the cypress tree and the moon, I started the swirling part by gluing down the paper strips no. 5 along with the shape of swirl. After that, I arranged paper trips mostly no. 1, 5 and 6, also a few strips no. 3, 7 and 8.

For the valley, I used paper no. 1, 2 and 5. The technique is the same as before, started from the shape of the valley, then arranged the strips to fully fill the shape.

If you take a closer look, I arranged the paper strips to follow a certain direction. For this part, paper no. 7 was mostly used. I added a bit of paper no. 5, 6 and 9. I also attached several minutes of footage of the making process.

The paper quilling finally complete. I just want to add some tips on taking a photograph of a paper quilling project. I personally prefer natural daylight, so I often take a photo of my paper quilling project in the morning around 7-8 a.m. Where? Anywhere there is enough light. Take several angles of the project to find an angle that can minimize the flaws in the project.

So this is how I made my Starry Night paper quilling. In this project, I need about a month until the project completely done. It was a nice time creating something I really like. I hope this instructable is easy to understand. But if it doesn't, feel free to ask me any question. Thank you :D

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