Wax

Overview

A single lit candle on a table. Press and hold anywhere to pour wax down its body. Each drip cools as it falls, and once it stops moving it bakes into the formation growing beneath the flame. Leave it alone and the candle drips on its own, so the sculpture never sits still for long.

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Highlights

• Pour and bake. Held drips ooze, cool and lock into the wax layer, building lopsided formations over time.
• A living flame. It flickers and leans away from fresh pours, with drifting embers, curling smoke and a heat-haze shimmer above it.
• Six colors. Amber, oxblood, honey, sage, bone and plum, each with its own molten glow, picked from a swatch bar that fades when idle.
• Sound made on the fly. Drip and sizzle are synthesized, pitched by drip size and how close the pour lands to the flame.

How It’s Built

One HTML file, no framework, no bundler, no assets. A 2D canvas draws the live scene each frame, and a second offscreen canvas bakes cooled drips into a permanent layer so the sculpture never has to be re-simulated. Flame, embers, smoke and shimmer are each a small particle system layered over the baked wax. All audio runs through the Web Audio API.

Process

Three passes: a single-file drip-candle sketch, an engagement pass to make the scene feel alive, and an art-direction pass that added the table, an ignite ramp for the flame, and the ambient atmosphere that ties it together.