Did a parent or caregiver ever tell you not to play with your food when you were growing up? Today I’m going to encourage you to do exactly the opposite. We’re going to play with veggies and paint, get creative, and have fun!

Vegetable stamping goes pretty far back and probably a lot of us can remember stamping with the cut side of an apple in an elementary school art class, or maybe even carving shapes into a potato to stamp pretty patterns on paper. I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way I began to really enjoy creating art with vegetables from my CSA share.

My favorite vegetables for artistic expression have historically been the ends of bok choy (see photos) and celery because they both create shapes that to me are reminiscent of rose petals. This year, though, I felt the desire to branch out a little by experimenting with a few different vegetables and so I tried onion, peapods, corn on the cob, and broccoli florets.

When I paint with produce, I go through a series of steps to prepare. First, I protect my surface with newspaper. Even though I usually use a washable acrylic paint, it’s nice to not have to worry when I purposely overlap the edges of the canvas or paper.

Then, I choose my acrylic paint colors and brushes from our art supply cabinet and also find a suitable “palette” for holding the paint – my favorite “palettes” are styrofoam trays, which I also hoard in our art supplies, along with single-serve yogurt containers, Mason jars, and takeout container lids.

Once everything is prepared, the fun begins. Unless I’ve used a vegetable before, I like to have scrap paper on-hand for doing a test stamp. I’ve also learned that watery vegetables will dilute the paint slightly.

For my most recent painting, I tested both the onion and the end of the ear of corn to decide on a stamping motion to use ahead of applying them to my actual painting – for the onion, this meant a rocking motion back and forth (twisting made it a giant blob), and for the end of the corn ear, I landed on a pressurized circular roll to try to hit every kernel.

I opt to use a brush to apply the paint to the vegetable because you can ensure a thin even layer of paint, but again that’s entirely up to the artist. Also, it’s really important to let each paint color dry completely before stamping a new color, unless you want to go reckless with it and aren’t worried about the colors making a big brown mess when they mix. I utilize a mini-fan to speed up the process.

In the piece seen here, I started out by sticking a small wood skewer into a section of an ear of corn to use as a handle as I rolled it all over the paper to create a pattern in yellow. This vegetable was for me the most fun of this painting, and I can see kids really enjoying the corn rolling.

Next, I used the cross-section of the corn to create flower-ish stamps in coral. The kernels weren’t as prominent as I had hoped for, but the abstract shape was pretty. Then, the darker green patterns were created by rolling the floret of broccoli and the lighter green is stamping straight down with the peapod.

The purple onion shapes came out nice, I thought. I did take my bamboo skewer and insert it between each layer of the onion and run it around in an attempt to separate the layers a bit beforehand.

Some might feel this activity to be wasteful of food, and I’d like to address that thought. Food waste is a major pet peeve of mine, and while there is minimal waste with a couple of these vegetables, for many, like celery, corn, or bok choy, I use the ends that will end up in my compost either way.

For the onion, I simply sliced off the painty part to compost and rinsed the remainder thoroughly to eliminate any stray drops and saved it for later. Of course, to do that, it’s important to use non-toxic paint.

While I lean toward the abstract with my pieces, another fun option would be to use vegetables to create a still-life or landscape painting. You can find some really great ideas for this online.

Framed vegetable paintings make great gifts for family members or friends. Additionally, if you stamp on thick paper or cardstock, you can cut your painted paper into greeting cards or multiple smaller pieces to frame once it’s dry.

Give this creative expression a try and you just might build up an appetite for playing with your food.

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