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AWESOME ART  WORK

Pretty amazing work of art!

(How do you step back and make those final  touches?)

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 colours of 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 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.

Napolean on horseback can be seen from the  skies,

created by precision planting and months of  planning between villagers and farmers in Inkadate

Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife  Osen appear in fields in the town of Yonezawa, Japan

And over the  past few years, other villages have joined in with the plant  designs.

Another famous rice paddy art venue is in the town of  Yonezawa in the Yamagata  prefecture.

This year’s design shows the fictional 16th-century  samurai warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife,

Osen, whose lives feature in television series  Tenchijin.

Various artwork has popped up in other rice-farming  areas of Japan this year,

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  roman variety to create the coloured patterns between planting and  harvesting in September.

The murals in Inakadate cover 15,000  square metres 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.

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

Closer to the image, the careful placement of  thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields can be  seen

The different varieties of rice plant 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.

In 2005 agreements between landowners allowed  the creation of enormous rice paddy art.

A year later,  organisers used computers to precisely plot planting of the four  differently colored rice varieties that bring the images to  life.