In our house, we craft…a lot! My daughter does a canvas painting every year for her birthday, a tradition we started when she was six months old. She has always loved painting and has done more paintings with her fingers and paintbrushes than we have wall space for. While I don’t think she has ever tired of using the traditional tools for painting, I do try to find fun ways to mix it up and introduce her to new tools and mediums. Since we are in the middle of our farm unit and learning about farm crops I thought, what could be more fun than painting with vegetables?!
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Why Paint with Vegetables?
Besides the fact that it is fun to mix things up, there are actually a lot of benefits to painting with vegetables. When we first started we just let our daughter explore everything on the table and play with it all as she pleased. I like to allow her time to think about the resources she has in front of her and see what she comes up with. After she had time to soak it all in we started talking about what she could do with the vegetables and facts about them as well.
From a learning standpoint, I made her name each vegetable she painted with and tell me where it grows, for example, carrots grow underground. We talked about how corn grows and when it is usually harvested. She told me what shapes she could see in each vegetable. I even made her some snacks with unused portions of some of the vegetables so she could try some she never had before, like ants on a log. For those who have never heard of ants on a log, it is a stick of celery, spread with peanut butter, and raisins carefully placed atop the peanut butter.
While I love sneaking in little bits of knowledge while we are doing fun, hands on activities, I really love the creativity that this project sparks. It really inspires kids to use their imagination while creating beautiful, or silly, pieces of art.
What Do You Need When Painting with Vegetables?
***DISCLAIMER: Parental supervision is required with all projects. I hope you enjoy the quality time creating memories together!***
- White cardstock
- Tempera paint
- Vegetables
We choose cardstock for this project because it is durable and inexpensive. We didn’t want to use canvas since we were doing a lot of experimenting. You could use plain paper, but paint can seep through it so I recommend cardstock. You can choose any color cardstock you want, as long as your paints will show up.
For the vegetables, you can pick anything you want. I chose ones we already have at home, with a couple of additions. Below are the ones we used:
- Carrots
- Celery
- Broccoli
- Romaine lettuce
- Bell pepper
- Ear of corn
What Can You Paint with Vegetables?
At first, we just let our daughter have fun with each vegetable and see what kind of shapes each might make. She put a lot of paint on the vegetables; for some of them that made it difficult to see a unique shape, they came out as blobs. After she explored that, we suggested she only dip it lightly in the paint and brush some off. That gave us some fun shapes and brushstrokes to work with. Sometimes, she just pushed the vegetable down onto the paper, like a stamp. Other times, she dragged it across lightly, like you would a brush. We began to notice that, with a little imagination, we could use our new “paintbrushes” to make some fun artwork that we could recognize.
I cut off the bottom of a head of romaine lettuce and gave it to E to paint with. We noticed it left a super fun pattern on the paper, as long as we didn’t use too much paint. We used it to make a flower, a celery stalk to make the stem, and broccoli to make the leaves. Speaking of broccoli, it makes a terrific tree or grass. I cut off the top part of a bell pepper and it made a great sun!
Check out some of our creations below. If you try this project, we would love to see your creations, too! Head on over to our Facebook page and share a picture of your little artist’s masterpiece.
Happy Crafting!