I Want Candy!

Last week I was thinking of alternative mediums for creating art. I have also started back to the gym in the quest for weight loss. And with losing a few pounds here and there some foods get knocked off the eating block. One food, of course, is candy. Well that shoots my idea of eating about 100 pack of Starburst fruit chews after gluing the wrappers to a piece of cardboard in color patterns.

Actually I had planned to glue lots of unopened Starburst cubes onto a piece of cardboard and one by one each them by carefully opening each one and pulling it out of the wrapper without taking the wrapper off the cardboard. I think it would look quite interesting like someone ate the art but it was intentional. If the color showed through then you would have a soft textured pattern of the original design remaining.

I might still find the time and patience and money to do this but in lieu of the semi-diet I've put myself on I had to find a less calorie intensive approach to my idea of using candy for art. This isn't a new idea to use food for art. Fruit has been used in still life painting for centuries. And even today there is a commercial for some cereal in which the entire commercial is made out of the little bits of cereal. It's some bear climbing up a tree and getting honey from a hive for those who want to keep track.

Regardless I thought that an easy candy to use that I could duplicate electronically would be M&Ms. A computer program probably could have done wonders creating the Starburst candy art that I proposed but I felt I didn't have the time to work on that one. Instead I simply squished a sphere applied a bitmap of the letter 'm' in courier and viola, instant digital M&M. Actually it was two spheres, one for the see through bitmap and one for the colorful candy coated shell.

Following in the vein that I would make an image or a grid filled with M&Ms to create something, I created a little program that read the elements of a 2-dimensional array to simply fill in the colors and assign a position in the 3-D world for each M&M. So the eyes of the less program oriented people don't glaze over, basically I filled in the squares of a piece of graph paper with different colors to make an image. I started with a little smiley face to test it out.

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