Well, that’s pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?

Will be back soon.

When you try to make candles out of bones, the vertebral column becomes quite an obvious choice: just pile a couple vertebraes on top of each other, and here it is! You get a nice tall candle and, contrary to using other long bones in the human body, wide enough to burn for some time and stand by itself.

Well, long story short, I wanted to make one… There was an issue, though: when I was thinking about it, I was, like most people I guess, thinking about a pile of what is called the centrum or the vertebral body. But there is more! I was completely forgetting the vertebral arch, which constitute the posterior part of a vertebrae. Hum, an image is probably needed. Wikipedia power:

Those funny looking bits are quite thin and elongated, which is nearly anathema to any kind of candle, especially with the kind of molds I use…

What was the solution, then? Well, brute force, of course! Just break’em to make them fit and that’s it…

In any case, I never pretended that it was a accurate copy, and I quite like the result. And it is quite obvious what it is, despite all the inaccuracies and “artistic licence”…

Just a extra-quick post with a nice citation, while I try to disentangle myself of a stupidly busy week  (I’m just not used to that anymore, that’s all…)

Orson Welles, in The Third man:

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

…

Here it is:

Work on that candle was initiated by my research into what ended up being the current, new, Epitafe logo, i.e., the half-skull. Looking at it upside down, I wondered if that shape could work out as a candle, with the wick protruding from the chin.

But early attempts quickly proved how wrong I was… I ended up with a very unbalanced candle, not mentioning that the wick had to be twisted down backwards in order to have enough wax to burn. The problem was not so much with the idea, but with the human anatomy :-)!

The solution came later: with a wider, bigger lower jaw, and with placing a “regular” candle behind it (do not tell anybody, but that piece comes from plastic legs from a piece of furniture long gone). Those two measures had the effect of both providing enough wax to the wick and also of creating a very nice lighting effect in mid-burning, as in the photo below:

As a sidenote, that skull indeed has a very, very large lower mandible and the very pronounced brow ridges would make a pretty strange human face if it was covered in muscles and flesh. The cleft in the chin was unintentional, but gives a bit more character to the skull, so it stayed :-).