The Mind Boggling Micro World of Food Styling

Yesterday I styled nut clusters for a packaging shot. It was one of those shoots where I was required to work on something very small and very detailed for a very long time. Detail work is great for me since I am able to get into the "zone" pretty easily and can concentrate for hours on end in one small area. The clusters were 1 inch cubes. They were made up of almonds and cranberries and sugar syrup as a binder. Then, they were dipped in white chocolate. My job was to cut one open and make each half  look "perfect". And not just perfect as in looking at it sitting on set. Perfect with each nut enlarged bigger than the size of the computer monitor! 

Making something look perfect, in my opinion, is sometimes better left to machines, illustrators or God.....but I am always up for a challenge so I tried anyway.  After attempting to cut these open and find one that cut beautifully clean and showed the required 3-5 nuts and 1-2 cranberries I decided fate was not going to be the answer. It's something you really don't know unless you try it and see the outcome. Everything was crumbling, chocolate was dragging, cranberry color was running into the chocolate, nuts were not nicely dispersed, etc.......Plan B.  I decided to build the perfect nut cluster with hot glue, clay and carefully chosen and individually cut nuts and cranberries. Yikes! Many hours later with dozens of trips back and forth to put it on set and under the "microscope" I was finished. The art director gave the thumbs up. They looked "close enough" like mirror images of each other to move on to dipping in chocolate. OK, so who knew that (red)clay would melt by the heat of the warmed white chocolate? Plan C. Drizzled the chocolate on the sides and back of the cluster so the entire cluster was not subject to the heat. And, it worked. Let that set in the frig for 5 minutes and it was ready for the next step.  I needed to shave off chocolate from the "cut" side of each cluster to make it look cut and not dipped. After another  hour or so of looking at the cluster on the computer monitor and adjusting cranberry goo or crumbs of white chocolate or microscopic pieces of fuzz that had found their way to my lovely cluster it was finally approved by the art director. 

Truthfully, it was a LONG 11 hour day. I spent about 6 hours straight on just one nut cluster. And I wondered to myself how many food stylists out there are not good at detail work and model building. Probably quite a few that have come into this job with food skills but not art skills.  This job portrays exactly what I mean when I tell people that I only care about how the food looks. And, I am not a chef........I am a food artist.