The miracle of loaves and sharks...

I am doing the cookbook cover for our church. It should be out before Christmas and will be a lovely holiday gift. Mary Oxenrider is going to share all of her secret recipes that we've come to love over the years.
Anyway, I am doing the cover. The black and white picture is the sketch we've decided upon. I sketched it from my imagination which is what I typically do.
The challenging part is recreating my sketch into real life. I do that, photograph it, and paint from the photograph.
Sometimes real life looks nothing like I imagined. This was one of those times when I got it pretty close.
On Monday, I drove all over town looking for goblets, the right bread, a table cloth, and wheat. The theme is loaves and fishes. I really didn't want to use real fish- they're expensive, smell bad, and I'd probably have to throw them out after an hour under the hot lights.
Then it hit me. Juliet's Beanie Baby sharks. "Crunch" was her very very favoritist toy ever. One time, she lost it. She cried for days. That was at the height of the Beanie Baby fad, and unfortunately, Crunch was a rare, discontinued toy. Ralph's mother had some connections in PA. She was able to obtain two Crunches which she sent out very quickly. We tucked one away in case of another loss, and we told Juliet that we found Crunch and that somehow he was clean again and had a new tag.
Soon after that, she found the original Crunch. She had put him in a dresser that I was refinishing at the time.
We then gave her the other Crunch and that's how she got three little shark bean bags that are remarkably the same size as Mackerels.
Any port in a storm, right?
BTW, Juliet is a really cool teen these days. She'd probably hate me for revealing this, but she still keeps her three little sharks on a shelf in her room. AWWWWWW!