Play with your food: healthy edible photo projects to print and frame

It's amazing what you can turn into beautifully printed artwork with a little creative thinking. In this guide, we'll look at how to craft your own fun, food-based art, then capture the results with your camera and make a vibrant print to show off your work. It's an enjoyable project to try out with the family, you probably have everything you need within easy reach and you can eat your creation as a healthy snack afterwards.

Gather a range of colourful foods for your funny face creations. Fresh fruit and vegetables are ideal, not only are they colourful and easily shaped, they're also a great way to promote healthy eating. Tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and carrots will offer a burst of colour, while smaller berries and nuts can be useful for making eyes and other facial features. Things that can be scattered like dried lentils or seeds work well, too. Some foodstuffs like bagels and pancakes are naturally face-shaped, so can give the kids a head start with their food artwork.

Now comes the fun part. Gather the family, pick a plate and arrange the food into a face, a whole figure or any other shape you like. Pick food colours that will complement or contrast with one another and keep in mind that some fresh items turn brown quicker than others, so save your apple or banana slices until last. As for plates and cutlery, plain plates in a variety of colours work best, avoid plates with intricate patterns as they can distract from the food. Keep a knife and board to hand for chopping and shaping the finer details.

Try transforming an everyday snack into a striking structure like our sandwich-stack Big Ben here. Things like bread, biscuits, cereals and cake can be easily built up – and hidden kebab sticks can keep them from tipping over. The kids will have a great time creating their own famous landmark, and it's just as much fun to demolish it for lunch afterwards.

Once the food art is finished, grab your camera and set up a shot. If shooting down from above, try placing a piece of coloured paper underneath the plate for a vibrant backdrop. Choose a paper colour that contrasts with your plate of food. If you have one, use a tripod for your shot. A tripod allows you to shoot at slower shutter speeds, which in turn lets you use a lower ISO for images with less noise. If you don't own a tripod then shooting handheld is perfectly fine, but might require a higher ISO. With your camera set up on a tripod, this allows more freedom for changing the composition of your shot.

Window light is ideal for still life photography like this. A window offers a large bank of illumination that bathes your food in soft, even light. Choose a spot next to a large window – although remember to avoid direct sunlight – and experiment to see whether the direction of light works better from above or to one side. If you find the light is too strong on one side, you can use a reflector or a piece of white paper to bounce light back into the shadows from the opposite side.

You can use whatever camera settings you're comfortable with, but here's a handy stock exposure setting for tripod-mounted shots: set your camera to Aperture Priority (Av) mode and use a mid-range aperture like f/8, then set your ISO to 100. The camera will work out the ideal shutter speed for you. With these settings, the shutter speed is likely to be fairly slow, so set a 2-second timer in order to prevent camera shake when triggering the shutter, or use the Canon Camera Connect app to take the picture remotely from your mobile device.

Once you've taken photos of your creations, why not make a print? You can prepare for printing with ease using the Canon Easy-PhotoPrint Editor application. Transfer your images onto your smartphone using the Canon Camera Connect app or image.canon then open the images on Easy-PhotoPrint Editor app, choose a paper size and use the crop feature to get rid of any messy edges. You can also choose from a range of filters to enhance the tones. Be sure to set the correct Media Type in the Print settings, Matte or Gloss, and set the print quality to Best. It's worth saving a print preset too – in the Preset dropdown – so you can use the same print settings on the rest of your food art with a couple of clicks.

Load a few pieces of Matte photo paper into your printer and start printing. Once finished, consider framing your prints. You could also use Canon Magnetic Photo Paper and stick your creations to your fridge, or use a Canon SELPHY Square QX10 to print directly onto stickable square photo paper! Your colourful masterpieces will look fantastic grouped together into a collage on a wall or mantelpiece, and what better way to cement the memory of a fun afternoon of foodie craft?

Written by James Paterson