Tired of just looking at paintings? Now it’s time to get inside them

Discover art in a whole new way with VanGoYourself.com

Ever wanted to recreate a version of Vermeer’s Milkmaid in your own kitchen or get together with your friends on a Saturday night out and recreate the scene in Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper ? A brand new website, VanGoYourself.com, designed via the Europeana Creative project to get people to rediscover and engage in classic paintings from around the world in a new and exciting way.

VanGoYourself has just been launched today May 15, 2014 with great exposure on the BBC Arts website. Check out the video to learn more!

VanGoYourself encourages you to recreate classic scenes from some of world’s most famous paintings in a contemporary setting, which you can then share with your friends on social media. The site features works from Masters such as Van Gogh or Rembrandt - with over fifty paintings from more than ten collections in seven European countries all just waiting to be recreated!

The participating collections are the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Museum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, the Herbert Gallery in Conventry, the Royal Pavilion and Museum in Brighton, the Compton Verney Museum (UK), the Villa Vauban in Luxembourg, the Saarlandmuseum in Saarbrücken and the Stadtmuseum Simeonstift in Trier, Germany.

The birth of VanGoYourself! The Europeana Creative team having supper in Mons. License of this image- CC-BY-SA License of original image- Fondazione Federico Zeri - Universita? di Bologna - Public Domain

So how does it work?

First channel your inner artist then pick a classic painting from the selection on the VanGoYourself website. Get together with your friends to recreate the famous scene, take a snap and upload it to VanGoYourself, which will twin your new master with the original artwork for you to share on social media, thus immortalising your artistic talent for all to see!

The site allows you to choose the level of difficulty –do you want a painting that is "easy" or "challenging" to recreate? You can choose paintings with "selfie" potential or ones "for lovers". The site is free and simple to use, and links up to existing widely used social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.

Screenshot of the VanGoYourself website, with some of the VanGo'd images so far

Who is behind it?

VanGoYourself is a Europeana Innovation created by a group of people who love museums, paintings and having fun. It is the brainchild of Culture24 in the UK and Plurio.net in Luxembourg, both non-profit, independent art entrepreneurs with a sense of humour. They have a track record of successfully working internationally to support arts and heritage venues to reach audiences online and to challenge the views of some people who think museums can be boring.

The work is part of Europeana Creative, the European Commission funded project to enable and promote the greater re-use by creative industries of cultural heritage resources aggregated by Europeana. Europeana is a digital platform that makes Europe’s cultural heritage open and freely accessible in a range of ways and places. Anyone can explore, discover and share more than 30 million items from museums, libraries, galleries and archives across Europe at Europeana.eu from their mobiles, computers or tablets and Europeana’s API is available to creative and cultural organisations and industries.

VanGoYourself is a responsive webservice built in WordPress by Surface Impression in the UK. The design is by the Europeana Creative partner Spild af Tid in Denmark and the image twinning tool is built by the Europeana Creative partner Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna.

What is the added value of VanGoYourself for museums and collections?

The service offers a genuinely different and surprisingly deep way for visitors to engage with heritage, based on emotion, playfulness and curiosity. As well as existing as a simple online service, the idea can be deployed by tourist offices, museums, cities, tour guides, etc to promote specific destinations, sites and events.

It provides the touristic sector with a way for audiences to have an emotion collection to a place through a playful interaction with its own cultural heritage. It has been built so that spin off collections of twinned images can be offered based on the collections from one specific city or museum. This can then be used to support live events, workshops and participatory activities and easily integrated into existing marketing schemes in a light weight and cost effective way.

Follow the discussion and share your twinned images at VanGoYourself.com or on Twitter @VanGoYourself