The briefing for this piece was “a mage staff of gnarled wood with embedded pieces of fiery crystalline.” I offered to fulfill this and also make the fiery crystalline glow, which involved additional tricks with lightweight electronics embedded below layers of foam and illusion film.

You can kinda see in the second view above that I made part of the wood (with the wiring going up through it) extend in a loop out from the main pillar of the staff, so that this character could really grip and lean with all their frail weight on the staff under that loop, without having to worry about squishing the LED strip embedded within.

It is not easy to get foam and duct tape to imitate wood grain, I tell ya. I sliced wood patterns and shapes by hand with a craft knife into insulation foam, then maneuvered the wood-brown duct tape into, across, and around all the crevasses of those 3D shapes.

The gnarled wood pattern twists and winds around the staff all the way down (it’s six feet of this stuff!), so there are glowing patterns all around its different sides. Here’s a combination I was particularly pleased with. There’s a switch for turning the lights on and off hidden in a knot of the wood just above this.

In places where the glowing doesn’t come through, the LED strip is embedded lower down in the foam wrapping the bamboo core.

In the parts where light is visible, starting from the innermost layer, there’s: Bamboo, then 3/4-inch pipe insulation foam, then an LED strip, then clear closed-cell foam, then illusion film (this means that as you change perspective on the fiery parts, the reds seem to shift, giving the effect added depth), and then extra insulation foam carved to wood textures, then duct tape.

The core for this one is bamboo, since sturdiness was key for the load-bearing walking-stick aspect. At the top of the staff, the striking surface has first closed-cell foam coating the core, then plenty of open-cell foam below the duct tape, so this boffer actually hits especially softly. Gotta stay safe while looking like a fiery mage in the night. And it did indeed look pretty impressive at night in the forest seeing this character walking along in the distance, a torch amidst the darkness.