So… you may have seen the Facebook video doing the rounds showing a white panel, six lit sparklers revealing a beautiful forest scene with silhouetted deer. “Fantastic”, I thought, “I’ll have a go at that!” There were no instructions, but a quick internet search suggested that the panel was painted birch ply, that the water mist was a lemon juice/water mix, and that the branches were not, in fact, the sparkler traces, but painted neat lemon juice. Beautiful and ethereal isn’t it:

So I tried on paper – it burst into flames and ended up as ashes. I tried on an oval canvas panel, which didn’t flame, but didn’t look at all like the picture (see below). Then I tried acrylic spray paint on a wood panel – that gave a nice abstract piece, but nothing like the internet video… I tried neat juice, dried juice, spritzed juice, every combination I could think of.

I had my suspicions that this was the crafting equivalent of fake news. No combination of paint, wood, lemon juice and sparklers I tried resulted in anything but a highly scorched line and complete lack of ethereal qualities. Then I tried a YouTube search for ‘sparkler art’ and came across this video. It seems that even in the craft/art world, someone is delighted to take the time to fake a technique. I now have just less than a pack of 100 sparklers to use up…