Crop Art

RICE FIELDS OF JAPAN ° Looks ordinary enough...

but watch as the rice grows.

Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan ,

but this is no alien creation.

The designs have been cleverly PLANTED!

Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye.

Instead, different color rice plants

have been precisely and strategically arranged

and grown in the paddy fields.

As summer progresses and the plants shoot up,

the detailed artwork begins to emerge.

A Sengoku warrior on horseback

has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants.

The colors are created by using different varieties of rice plants,

whose leaves grow in certain colors.

This photo was taken in Inakadate , Japan .

Napoleon on horseback can be seen from the skies.

This was created by precision planting

and months of planning by villagers and farmers

located in Inkadate, Japan.

Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife, Osen,

whose lives are featured on the television series 'Tenchijin'

appear in fields in the town of

Yonezawa in the Yamagata prefecture of Japan .

This year,

various artwork has popped up in other rice-farming areas of Japan ,

including designs of deer dancers.

Smaller works of 'crop-art' can be seen in other rice-farming areas of Japan

such as this image of Doraemon and deer dancers

The farmers create the murals

by planting little purple and yellow-leafed Kodaimai rice

along with their local green-leafed Tsugaru, a Roman variety,

to create the colored patterns

in the time between planting and harvesting in September.

The murals in Inakadate cover 15,000 square meters of paddy fields.

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.

Closer to the image,

the careful placement of the thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields

can be seen.

Rice-paddy art was started there in 1993

as a local revitalization project,

an idea that grew from meetings of the village committees.

The different varieties of rice plants

grow alongside 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.

But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more attention.