Fruit & Vegetable Characters: Mulga (Joel Moore) style ~ Yr 5-6

You can only love the fun and zany art of Joel Moore, aka Mulga. ( @mulgatheartist ) His characters and scenery are bright and imaginative. We looked at his mural of fruit characters that he did in a shopping centre in Sydney as well as his process of drawing, colouring and outlining his pictures through some videos on YouTube.

After watching Mulga’s art process on several videos, students completed the following sheet. (It could be used on Seesaw, rather than printing out.) His ‘Art Process’ is 1. pencil sketch 2. colouring /painting 3. Outlining and adding texture marks in black fine liner.

mulga-the-artist_sheet Download

Students chose a fruit or vegetable as a character, sketch it out in pencil, with Mulga style glasses, nose, moustache/ beard and mouth. They then coloured with coloured markers.

Darker shades of colour can be added if applicable, or use a fine line black marker to add texture lines or shapes to the fruit. Everything is then outlined, before being cut out.

To make the background, a colour cover paper was chosen that works well with their fruit/ veg. Folding up a piece of white paper several times, a shape, like a cloud, star etc. was cut out and glued onto the cover paper background and then their character glued on.

Finally once complete, students gave their character a name and wrote a silly story about it (like Mulga does).

Build a Burger Mixed Media Collage – Yr 1 / 2

I have seen many lessons and variations of this activity, but this idea came from ‘Kids Artists- Building Sandwiches’ here.

The Year 1 & 2 classes were working on a Food theme in their classrooms, and I usually tie in with their inquiry unit somehow. I introduced them to a couple of artists who made food related art. One was Claes Oldenburg, Swiss born American. They were fascinated by his larger than life food sculptures, especially the outdoor ones. For this project we looked at his soft sculptures- Floor Burger 1962, and Giant BLT (Bacon Lettuce Tomato) Sandwich 1963.

We discussed what they thought the sculptures were made of (materials & techniques) and watched a video of curators putting together the components for a BLT model for a Oldenburg exhibition.

Learning Intentions & Success Criteria for these lessons:

I am learning about Claes Oldenburg and his soft and hard sculptures of food.
I will learn about shape, variety and texture so I can represent various items of food for a burger / sandwich. I can use a variety of papers to make shapes to represent various foods to go in a “sandwich/burger”. I can overlap the foods when gluing down.

The idea was to “build” a tall sandwich / burger.

Each student started by choosing some painted paper to glue at the bottom of a long piece of paper (A2 cut lengthways) for a table cloth and then gluing a paper plate cut in half on top.

Next they cut two burger bun shape from ribbed cardboard and on of these is glued to the plate. They then start at the bottom gluing their “food” – painted paper, tissue paper coloured paper cut, scrunched or torn into a shape of sandwich fillings. They used a hole punch to make a yellow card look like swiss cheese. Tissue paper was great for lettuce and shaved ham! They needed overlap the food slightly and not glue down everything down flat, to help give the sandwich some form.

The Achievement Standards by the end of Year 2 (Victorian Curriculum) are: Students make artworks using different materials, techniques and processes to express their ideas, observations and imagination. Students describe artworks they make and view, including where and why artworks are made and viewed.

ASSESSMENT: To assess this activity I used the seesaw app which all student artwork (and sometimes work in progress) is photographed in their individual “folio”. Firstly I uploaded a photo of the Oldenburg BLT for students to add a recording of what they thought the item was, what it was made of and why it might have been made. After students completed their artwork they commented on their own piece, describing the components, techniques and different materials they used to represent the food.

Food Faces~ Giuseppe Arcimboldo inspired- Year 3-4

These lessons were part of the Year 3 & 4 Inquiry Unit of ‘Food Sources’. We began by viewing artworks by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, completing an “I see, I think, I wonder” then shared thoughts, describing, and discussing. We watched a couple of YouTube videos about the artist, before comparing artworks and making our own inspired by Arcimboldo’s portraits.

I went to a market and bought a variety of fruit and veg including $1 bags of food on their last legs! I also got students to bring in pieces of fruit and vegetables to use to make a food portrait. I set up a table with the fruit and veg in containers, some cut in half and 5 face templates to work on. The other students were working on drawing a food face portrait.

Fruit and Vegetable Portraits in oil pastels, water soluble pastels and coloured pencils.

Full lesson plan is available below with activities, video links I used, learning intentions and success criteria, Venn Diagram sheet and student evaluation sheet.

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