This lesson is based on the amazing art of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. If you have never seen any of his work you need to look him up. I used Arcimboldo by Taschen and Hello Fruit Face! to start off this lesson. There are lots of great photos of his art.

To have the best resources for this project, get your name on the mailing lists for some vegetable/fruit seed catalogs and some flower seed catalogs. You can also use floral scrapbooking paper clip magazine pictures, but you need a lot so I don’t recommend this. Depending on what age you are doing this lesson for you may want to pre-cut some flowers and fruits and vegetables. 

I have the kids trace my pattern piece of the head onto their poster board. Then they draw in the lips, eyebrow, and eye with pencil, and paint these in with watercolors. Then I have them outline the head and facial features with sharpie.Next they paint the space around the heads with black acrylic paint (or leave this white, see last step).

Next step is to decide whether they are doing a man or woman and a fruit/vegetable face or a flower face. Then they need to choose their pictures-getting different sizes and types.

They mod podge them onto the head going around the facial features. You can either leave the heads on the same paper or have the students cut around the heads and glue, using rubber cement on a black piece of poster board.

New step by step Arcimboldo lesson in my upcoming book. Click here to see more information on my book and subscribe for book updates!

Please refer people back to this site if you use this lesson! 🙂