Having just completed a set of Phantom costumes for Rex and Bianca, I needed an opulent Victorian theatre setting tp represent the Paris Opera House in 1881. The scene was going to be 'dark', so I wanted a dark wooden floor, that would reflect light from the candles. So that meant my dining-room table. I positioned the French doors so they opened into the room, and jammed them into place on the carpet. Then I got some very wide wooden rods to hold up the curtains across the tops of the open doors.
We went looking for small scale candles, but couldn't find any, so just used regular white tapers, cut down to size. I hot glued them onto the tops of some decorative candle stands, and spent some time dripping wax down them to make them look more interesting.
(with the French door open, you can see one of my 'secret' storage locations. The door itself has a fabric liner on the back - the same colour as the walls, and there's a brown curtain hanging off the front end of the end of the shelving unit, to hide the boxes when taking photos on the table. The shelving holds five boxes of doll clothes, and six boxes of fabrics, my camera case, and several bags of stuffing. But everything 'disappears' when the door is in its usual position)
We went looking for small scale candles, but couldn't find any, so just used regular white tapers, cut down to size. I hot glued them onto the tops of some decorative candle stands, and spent some time dripping wax down them to make them look more interesting.
(with the French door open, you can see one of my 'secret' storage locations. The door itself has a fabric liner on the back - the same colour as the walls, and there's a brown curtain hanging off the front end of the end of the shelving unit, to hide the boxes when taking photos on the table. The shelving holds five boxes of doll clothes, and six boxes of fabrics, my camera case, and several bags of stuffing. But everything 'disappears' when the door is in its usual position)
Then I waited until later in the day, when it wasn't quite so bright in the room, and lit the candles....
In one of my wakeful periods that night, I decided the candles seemed a bit big after all, so we made one last attempt to find some smaller ones, and found some at the local party store. They were a bit thinner than I would have liked this time, so I spent an hour dripping wax down them to make them wider, and 'drippier'.....
I took a side view shot this time, and waited until later in the afternoon when the sun went down behind the house to the west of us, and it wasn't quite so bright out. Then lit the candles, and took the photos using the camera with timer on my tri-pod.........much better!
As careful as I tried to be, I did get plenty of wax on my table - not from the candles themselves dripping, but from the melted wax spraying when I blew the candles out (several times per photo shoot, so the candles wouldn't burn down too quickly as I changed poses). However, I googled 'how to remove wax from a wooden table, and they said to scrape it off with the edge of an old credit card. Which worked like magic!
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