Playing With My Food

Today I food propped a little. The potatoes, onions and garlic were already made. I'm happy with they way they look. Everything in Halfland will be at this level of detail and realism or lack of detail and realism, the same rustic folk style.

I painted real, dried flower seed pods with acrylic and gloss medium to make green peas. I painted glued clusters of tiny glass (no hole) beads with tinted medium to finish off the raspberries. I took deep garnet seed beads and packed them with glue into dried, round seed pods to make pomegranates. They will be displayed in Rana's kitchen on a platter, some closed, some cracked open. (Full disclosure: pomegranates are my favorite food.) I was going to hand-place each seed bead in the right direction but I think this quicker result fools the eye sufficiently.
I painted the insides of the faux glass bottles with ink colors and it really looks interesting, just like liquid inside glass. I sketched up the Writing Mouse with a hand puppet to show the scale his final puppet will be.

Mouse Hand Puppet Test on VimeoHimself kindly loaned one of his outstanding rat hand puppets for a little quick clip, so I could see whether the Writing Mouse character could be a live action/stop-motion puppet hybrid. He would still have a wire armature for the stop motion movements at his desk, but could also move from my hand inside if I wanted to say... shoot outdoors! Matter of fact, this is what I'll be doing at the start of the film with the black mermaid, Kyra, at the shore too! Halfland now has two rod/hand/armature puppet hybrids.

Programming Note: There's a lot I'd like to say about my experience at the ASIFA-Hollywood Expo last Saturday, it's been revealing and galvanizing for several reasons. Tomorrow I'll have more time to write up what I learned.