paint cut paste

okay, so who among us hasn’t repinned this okra stamping tip junkie pin yet?

idea from newhouseproject.com featured on tip junkie

i pinned it a while back, and like most of my pins, considered it collected among zillions of ideas i may never get to. until tonight when i was cutting up okra — one of N’s absolute favorite foods of all time!

when i cut the tops off, i put them aside in a bowl. then gathered up some random scrap paper, squirted out two paint colors of N’s choosing, and let her have at it while our homemade gluten free pizza baked in the oven.

i probably could have cut the okra to have smoother, flatter surfaces. i probably could have picked out the seeds to make cleaner prints. i probably could have added a medium to my paints to thin them out. but i did not because i was frying okra. and that’s okay.

okra really is so cool looking.

the prints turned out kinda cool regardless of my jagged cutting and haphazardly thrown together while okra burns in the oil on stove art project.

a few days later. we made them into thank you notes and a birthday card.

we’ll likely try again another day with less of a time crunch and more planning. regardless, the fried okra was delish!

N came up with this idea while at whole foods on friday. while in the produce section, she said, “let’s make veggie art!” i asked what she meant, and she said she wanted to “build a bird out of fruits and veggies when we get home.” um, okay.

i remembered having this play with your food book waaay back in the day, and we have done our share of food-related art posts here, but i was just psyched that this was fully her imagination and doing. when we unpacked the groceries, she picked some items she’d make a bird out of.

she instructed me to cut the tip off the carrot for a beak and to slice some thin carrot slices for legs. then she asked for toothpicks.

i had to help her push the sharp toothpicks into some of the harder produce, like the bird’s sweet potato body, but she was able to do most of it.

apple head + carrot beak + sweet potato body + raisin eyes + carrot legs + banana wings = brilliant bird!

then we ate the bird with our lunch — it’s the only way we vegetarians are gonna get any poultry!

(hen shirt is total coinkidink)

every time i make a salad, i think about print-making with the vegetables. (what? like you don’t? um….. oh.) i remember being a kid and carving stamps out of raw potatoes and carrots. recently, the fam has been eating a lot of romaine, and i think about printing rose shapes every time i chop off the bottom of a heart of romaine. so tonight after dinner, we went for it with the print-making. grabbed some red paint, a brush, a piece of paper, and the end of the lettuce. (dark photos = it was evening, and i hate flash.)

salad with a side of paint

N helped to paint the lettuce with red paint. ideally for stamping, one would use a brayer and ink, but paint will do the trick. it would also be ideal if you knew in advance of making salad that you wanted to stamp afterward so that you’d cut the lettuce on a straight and even plane, unlike i did tonight.

then we just pressed it onto the page, and there’s our romaine rose!

press to print

i added a few green leaves later, as a reference point for the flower, and there ya go! makes a sweet card or a frame-worthy print.