Hand-painted candles

The Hearth article in this year's Christmas issue of The Storybook Home Journal featured hand-painted candles inspired by Dickens' novella, The Battle of Life and The Pickwick Papers. We simply couldn't resist the idea of personalizing candles to brighten Christmas and the coming year (besides, they made marvelous Christmas gifts!). The article provides detailed visual and verbal instructions for creating candles embellished with mistletoe, sweetbrier, and delicate Christmas greenery.

The only thing we didn't have room to include in the article was the color palette Elspeth used to create the motifs featured in the article, so we provide that here, hoping it may be of help. For the candles painted specially for our Dickens' Christmas, we chose Apple Barrel's "crimson," "grass green," and "soft apple,"Ceramcoat's "ivory," and Grumbacher's "alizaron crimson" and "burnt umber" acrylic craft paints--for those not already equipped for at-home painting, acquiring a standard artist's palette can be expensive and make color mixing more difficult. So we suggest that, particularly for beginning painters, pre-mixed blends such as those suggested in this color palette can save time and unnecessary grief. For any who already have an artist's color palette, any of the colors needed to paint Elspeth's candle designs can be mixed from white, yellow ochre, cadmium red, ultramarine blue, raw umber, and lamp or ivory black.

Tags: 2010, Christmas, Hand crafts, Holidays