About Van Gogh's Card

A small studio for making Van Gogh-style cards, built from algorithms rather than filters.

1Painting, not filtering

A card is built stroke by stroke: a deep base and colour fields first, then strokes follow a flow field made of two opposed swirls and a sine wave; about one stroke in six carries a brighter impasto ridge and one in five a companion complementary colour beside it — the way Van Gogh put yellow and violet-blue on either side of a single mark. The strokes shrink and brighten as they layer, and the stars come last.

2Colour with a memory

The palette library holds 27 colour sets distilled from Van Gogh's works, each with its own mood and period. Uploaded photos pass through a Wu colour quantiser and are then harmonised toward the nearest Van Gogh palette, so their colours feel at home on the canvas.

3Yours to keep

From colour extraction to layout to export, it is one continuous workflow: bands, radius, stroke density and sparsity are all adjustable; results export as raster images, vector SVG, an animated painting-process GIF, a pasteable HTML snippet, or print to PDF.

4Van Gogh's Arles and the Yellow House

In February 1888 Van Gogh arrived in Arles and rented the Yellow House on Place Lamartine, calling it the “Studio of the South”; he painted the sunflowers and the wheat fields there until May 1889, when he committed himself to the asylum at Saint-Rémy. The Yellow House itself was destroyed by bombing in 1944, and a plaque marks the site today.

5Saint-Rémy, Auvers and Van Gogh's Starry Night

During his year at Saint-Rémy he painted The Starry Night from the window of his room and twisted the cypresses into green flames; in May 1890 he moved north to Auvers-sur-Oise for his last two months, painting The Church at Auvers, Portrait of Dr Gachet and Wheatfield with Crows. Those works are now spread between Amsterdam, New York, London and Paris.

6Where are Van Gogh's paintings today

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds the largest collection in the world (around two hundred oils); the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo is next. The Starry Night is at MoMA, the Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, with major works at the Musée d'Orsay and the Met — to see Van Gogh's paintings in one sweep, start in Amsterdam.

Walk the Rhône, then return to the studio

The Van Gogh in Arles page gathers the Yellow House, the sunflowers, the asylum at Saint-Rémy and where his paintings live; the gallery shows cards built from those same palettes.

Step into Van Gogh's Arles Browse the gallery of Van Gogh-style cards

Built with Next.js and HTML5 Canvas. All bundled fonts are licensed under SIL OFL 1.1.

Every page in both languages: the studio, Van Gogh's Arles, his paintings and the museums that hold them today.