Sweet sorrows

Below is an image that embodies some of the challenges of working at a small scale. The original vision I had involved filling the smaller grave with black jellybeans. Eventually I found a large enough bag of jellybeans of the right sort on Amazon that contained enough black ones that once I’d picked them out, I’d be able to fill the hole. I did shoot it that way, but problems were immediately evident. The jellybeans didn’t read as candy. However carefully I arranged them to make their bean shape apparent, they didn’t look like jelly beans, but almost like large rocks. I couldn’t find a work around. Someone to whom I expressed my frustration suggested using some other candy. It seems obvious, but I had been fixated on black jelly beans. Possibilities abounded; what about little red cinnamon hearts? Smarties? 

My studio began to resemble a cheap confiserie as I assembled varieties of candy. But none of those looked right, either. Finally, a trip to a bulk food shop led to the discovery of mini M&Ms. I filled the grave with them, but their colourfulness, while an interesting effect, didn’t express the mood I was looking for. I had bought enough of those to be able to edit out all the colours other than brown, and that’s what I did. The image snapped into place, once enough of the brown mini M&Ms were carefully arranged into a mound and then moved so their little m would show. The brown candy also harmonized nicely with the larger grave mound, which is filled with dried coffee grounds. Both coffee grounds and candy are unruly when trying to make miniature mounds, and it took some time to arrange them to illustrate the grave shape I was striving for.

And now I have containers of numerous candies in my props storage. Surely those brilliantly colourful little pill-like shapes will be useful? Some context will appear to make jelly beans look like jelly beans?