Realistic Miniature LED Candles

In this instructable I’ll share my techniques and tips on making miniature candles. Great way to bring your dioramas to life, decorate dollhouses, window sills or shelves. Or just cool surprise your friends or family with cool crafted Christmas gift.

This instructable will be in two parts, first the simple version, then a little bit more advanced one.

* LED's

Warm white ones look the best in my opinion, you can use yellow ones as well.

1.8mm LED is quite small yet big enough for easy handling

I'll use 0805 SMD LED's for more advanced candles.

* Hot-glue gun (with some standard white opaque hot-glue of course:))

* Batteries or DC power source

* Current limiting resistors (depending from your choice of LED's and power source)

Start applying hot-glue to the LED as shown on the picture. Try to imagine the shape and size of your candle.

Leave the LED hat out from the glue as the flame part will be attached onto it later.

Add just small amount of glue along the length of tour candle, we'll make it thicker as we go along. Otherwise the glue will start dripping or flowing.

Tip: When the glue is still soft but not sticky you can roll the candle between your fingers to straighten it up and make it more cylindrical.

When the glue is set you can add another layer. Just keep adding layers until you are happy with your candle. Make it long and thin or short and thick.

Feel free to add realism with adding wax dripping effects or raising the rim to make some candle tunneling effects.

You can use hot tip/side of your glue gun to smooth it or fix some mistakes. You can even cut out entire side off with exacto knife and start over.

Next step is basically just adding a blob of hot-glue to act as a flame.

* Place a drop of Hot-glue on to of the LED

* Start pulling it away until droplet/flame shape is formed

* By gently blowing on the glue turn it upside down and let it set a little. Blowing solidifies the glue faster and holding it upside down helps it to maintain its shape.

* You can stretch the flame a little while the glue is still malleable

* Finally cut of the excess (with exacto knife of snips).

Tip: No worries if you mess it up, just trim the glue and try again!

Simple version of our diorama candle is now ready.

You can paint them as well, I use water soluble acrylic paint.

You can make them flicker, but it takes more effort. I’ve used simple arduino pro mini or Attiny85 for this purpose.

You can use flickering LED's as well, bu they all have yellow colors that i don’t like.

Just remember to use some kind of current limiting when using LED's in your project, easiest option is to use current limiting resistors.

let's make our candles even more realistic.

I'll be using smaller sized SMD LED's in 0805 format. They are tiny but still easy to solder wires to them. Again, warm whites are my preferred choice of color.

These are more finicky and more difficult to solder, but still doable.

These wires will act as our fake burnt wick and in my case i used solid core wire for anode, to add rigidity to it.

Thinner stranded wire is just wrapped/twisted around the supporting solid core wire.

This way we can create illusion of a single wick, you cannot do this with two thick wires.

Its better to have as light colored wire as possible for the wick. The dark wire inside the candle will be still visible and will ruin our illusion.

Just paint the tip of the wick black, in real life this will add tons of realism. I used regular sharpie for that.

Now just repeat steps 1..4 from this instructable.

Now you know how to easily create nice and realistic looking candles. Cool addition to dioramas or decorations.