Many great artists of the past used impressionist painting techniques - and now you can! You will need: paper watercolours or watered down poster paint, or crayons and pencils.

Here's an example of an impressionist painting. It’s all about making a picture by using lots of small brush strokes. It’s called "pointillism." Fancy having a go?

First, do a simple drawing of a scene. Just do the outlines, like the one you can see opposite. Hills, trees, buildings, just the basic shapes.

Next, colour this picture in using water colours or watered down poster paint. You don’t need to put in any detail just yet. You must colour quite lightly and wishy-washy.

You could use crayons for your picture instead.

To turn this into an impressionist painting, you have to go completely dotty! One way of adding the dots to the picture is to paint with the wrong end of a felt tip pen, as you can see here.

Keep adding more and more dots, using different colours for each part of your picture. You can see the blue sky being added here.

But you don’t have to use a felt tip pen. You can use also use your fingers!

You can see here that the painting's starting to shape up now!

To make a start on the finer detail, use the wrong end of a thin paintbrush.

Keep going... nearly there!

Use thinner brushes, or fingertips, to add more and more detail.

When you’ve finished, it’ll look something like this!

You don’t have to use paint. You can use felt tip pen dots with thin and thick pens. It’s just as good! That’s how to create your own impressionist style picture... by cheating! Try it yourself!