MURALS ARE EVERYWHERE AND ON EVERYTHING

AWESOME JAPANESE CROP ART WORK

Another offering from my personal Clip Gallery Art

From ground level, the designs are invisible, and viewers have to climb the mock castle tower of the village office to get a glimpse of the work.

Rice-paddy art was started there in 1993 as a local revitalization project, an idea that grew out of

meetings of the village committee.

Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan. However this is no alien creation - the designs have been cleverly planted. Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye. Instead different colours of rice plants have been precisely and strategicaly arranged and grown in the paddy fields.

As the summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed artwork begins to emerge...

Napolean on horseback can be seen from the skies, created by precision planting and months of planning between villages and farmers in Inkadate A Sengoku warrior on horseback has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants, the colours created by using different varieties, in Inakadate in Japan The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate, 600 miles north of Toyko, where the tradition began in 1993. The village has now earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry and this year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall. More than 150,000 vistors come to Inakadate, where just 8,700 people live, every summer to see the extraordinary murals. Each year hundreds of volunteers and villagers plant four different varieties of rice in late May across huge swathes of paddy fields. The different varieties of rice plant grow along side each other to create the masterpieces... In the first nine years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a simple design of Mount Iwaki every year. However, their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more attention. In 2005 agreements between landowners allowed the creation of enormous rice paddy art. A year later, organizers used computers to precisely plot planting of the four differently colored rice varieties that bring the images to life.