Emily Blincoe likes to arrange things by color. Image: Emily Blincoe In her most recent series, Sugar, she organizes candies by hue. Image: Emily Blincoe One of her favorite finds is the underwear on a stick. Image: Emily Blincoe She searched grocery and dollar stores for the candy before finding a goldmine at a local Austin vintage candy shop. Image: Emily Blincoe Blincoe shoots all of her photos outside on her covered patio. Image: Emily Blincoe "At the end of the day it's just candy on a table, but adding in matching colors and a nice arrangement makes it something different than you have maybe seen before," she says. Image: Emily Blincoe It might look like Blincoe is obsessed with organization, but she says she's actually gotten emails from people shaming her for not making her arrangements perfect. Image: Emily Blincoe She says she typically just eyeballs the arrangement of the candies. Image: Emily Blincoe For more things organized neatly, check out her Instagram. Image: Emily Blincoe

Few things are as pleasing to look at as colors organized neatly. For whatever reason, our eyes are drawn to an obsessively color-coded bookshelf or a freshly opened pack of crayons. Emily Blincoe is something of an expert on the matter of color coding.

A quick glance at her Flickr and Instagram and you’ll see fruit, nuts and everyday objects all neatly organized into color-specific, eye-pleasing arrays. In her most recent series, Sugar, Blincoe organizes our favorite sweets into her signature collage of colors.

>'Some not-so-mildly OCD folks have emailed about a jelly bean being crooked.'

It might seem like Blincoe’s fascination with colors is borderline OCD, but she insists her method is organized chaos. “I usually just kind of dump everything out and start placing the items around,” she explains of her process. Eye-balling her goods, she’ll arrange the candies according to size and shape, swapping them around until they look right.

There’s not a set method, and sometimes she leave something slightly askew. “I've found that quite a few folks are mildly OCD and that could be another reason people enjoy this type of arrangement,” she says. “Some not-so-mildly OCD folks have emailed about a jelly bean being crooked and how ashamed of myself I should be.”

Since she doesn’t have a studio, Blincoe does most of her shooting outside on her covered patio in Austin, which means dealing natural elements. “Wind, flies, heat, rain and time of day can all be issues,” she says. “Can you spot the fly I left in one if the images?”

Originally she had planned to do a chocolate-themed collage, but the Texas heat had something to say about that. “I was a huge mess and that one quickly got scrapped,” she recalls. “I will most likely revisit the chocolate image this winter since it's cooler out.”

Looking through Blincoe’s collection of candy is like taking a trip back to childhood. There’s your basic counter candy like Blow Pops, Reeses and Twix, but look close and you’ll see some deeper cuts. She found most of her goods at grocery and dollar stores, but she got much of her more obscure candies, like Lucky Lights cigarettes and Black Jack chewing gum, at a vintage candy shop on South Congress in Austin. “The underpants on a lollipop stick were probably my favorite as well as the most surprising,” she says. “Who knew there was a market for that?”

By the end of the series, Blincoe had enough candy to put even the most impressive Halloween haul to shame. “I decided early on that I needed to find a way to rid my house immediately of the candy so I wouldn't eat it all,” she says. So she loaded up a big sack with candy, stuffed it in her trunk and headed over to her friends house to drop it off.

There was just one problem: “A day or two later I realized that I never actually took the candy out of my trunk. I went to get it and it was in a sad, sad state,” she recalls. “I ended up tossing it all in the trash after saying a few words of remembrance. RIP candy, you won't be forgotten.”