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.

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).

Guiseppe Arcimboldo Food Portraits — Year 3-4

These lessons were part of the Year 3 & 4 Inquiry Unit of ‘Food Sources’. We began by viewing artworks by Guiseppe 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.

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

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