Simple Still Life: Month the Second, Part the Second

The Simple Still Life assignment for the month of October was as follows:

"The SUBJECT of round two: ONE ITEM (AND A SHADOW). Note, the shadow may belong to the item you are photographing, or so some other item out of the frame. ... we have four weeks to create something from our photos. Once again.. it can be anything. A fiber postcard, a drawing, an exercise in photoshop, a pair of socks... whatever. Post the photo of your completed object ON OCTOBER 28TH."

And here, as a reminder, was the photograph I started with: It's ok, but I didn't love it. And that tells me something, because it turned out that I didnt love anything else I did from this photo either. I tried and discarded a LOT of different things. Here are the three least-awful things I came up with. Here I played with replacing each votive section with something that was a similar color, but otherwise odd, and then played with the overall look by using various filters - a sort of Surrealist take on the photo. Here I just played with the color and contrast settings. I actually kind of like this one, but not enough to pursue it further. And here I played with some other filters, going for a kind of woodcut print effect. I don't mind this one either, but again, I don't care about it enough to do anything more with it. This tells me that whatever next month's assignment is, I need to find a starting image I'm more passionate about if I'm going to have any hope of really liking what I do with the image later. Yeah, I know, I know....Duh.