Amanda of Elemental Photography and Design created this tutorial for making your own TranspArt flame:
I wanted to try my hand at dying TranspArt and then turning those pieces into a flame prop for photos. If you want to make one yourself, these are the steps!
Step One:
Cut out some basic flamey shapes out of paper. Use them to get an idea of how big you want your finished piece to be.
Step Two:
Cut out the same shapes in your TranspArt.
Step Three:
Dye your TranspArt. For a tutorial on dying, click here!
Step Four:
Heat your pieces one at a time, then pull, stretch and pinch them to help make your individual ‘flame’ shapes.
Note:
Costumes by Cassandra used this tutorial to create her own flame for her Lup costume, and shared a great trick with us regarding shaping: aluminium foil!
I asked how she acheived the effect and if the foil sticking to the TranspArt was an issue, and here was her response:
“So if I tried to move it off the foil while it was warm it got a bit sticky, which I played with because it did cool things to the tips of the flames, but for the bodies of the flames, I let it totally cool before I moved it and it peeled off just fine. That said, if I overheated the plastic, it stuck a bit, but the foil bits were easy to pick off. There was just a bit of a learning curve to how long to heat it to get it to sink into the foil and do cool things and how long was too long. I made a few extra pieces assuming I’d mess up a bit.”
Step Five:
Heat and shape your pieces around one another, pressing the bottoms together. (I shaped mine around a small ball of parchment paper to help keep the middle open.) If you have trouble joining pieces, you can use hot glue for this.
If you want a handle, I used a strip of TranspArt and then covered it with thin peach spandex.
Congrats, you have a hand flame thing! You can also build an LED into it for additional effect. (I just tucked a red LED under mine for photos)
