Tell us about how you started creating art within the FFXIV community—did you start with personal art and slowly expand your work, or were you active in the XIV fan art community from the get-go?
Gideon: I would say I started with personal work–I still have the very first sketches I did of my original WoL from when I was brand new to the game and trying to get a feel for this character I was playing. In all honesty, a lot of what I create is with the intent for others to see it (or smell it), and this wasn’t any different; I was putting stuff out there as a way of communicating with other players, even if it was really just me and a little group of friends back then.
We’ve known each other for awhile, so I know creating fan merch is not new for you. I definitely still have some of your Dragon Age and Mass Effect pieces hanging around my house from way back. You started with similar merchandise in XIV—buttons, minimalist posters, acrylic charms—but are now focusing on your homemade candles. What incited or inspired you to explore new crafts for fan merch?
Gideon: You know, I always worry that this kind of thing makes me sound greedy or entitled, but the truth is that I never really received the reception I was hoping for with 2D artwork. Not that I was expecting to get e-famous or anything, but I always felt like I just wasn’t really hitting the mark as far as what resonated with people online, and compared to the amount of effort it felt like it took me to make anything in the first place (which I’ll get to in a minute), I was feeling pretty done with the high risk-high reward approach that comes with doing fan merch. There were a few items that I was very fortunate to have take off a bit on Etsy, but in general a lot of what I made just kind of sat in a closet. Prints, charms, pins, all of that is a financial investment and fan artists are often making a major gamble when they make it, and I couldn’t really do that anymore, on top of the… let’s say the emotional toll that it took, to watch products fail. So I was sort of exiting the sphere of “artist alley”-style merch anyway, and was wondering what else I had to offer.
Previously, your fan merchandise focused primarily on graphic design, with some illustration. Can you talk about your journey from digital graphic design to hands-on crafting? Was crafting something you always wanted to explore, or did the opportunity manifest itself unexpectedly?
Gideon: I love talking about this, haha. It was kind of a couple different trains of thought colliding into an “a-ha!” moment. So, like I mentioned before, I was easing out of a very saturated fan merch market after I had, basically, a come-to-Jesus situation with myself, like, “Okay, I can’t keep doing this, it’s really difficult for me to produce 2D art and especially on a level that lends itself well to those kinds of goods, I’m just shooting myself in the foot here.” But at the same time, I still had this desire to create in some way and share these kinds of… nonverbal thoughts somehow, so I was actively looking for something that would feel less like punishing myself.
At the same time, I was thinking about why on Earth it is so hard for me to really do illustration, because I’ve always had an almost palpable difficulty conceptualizing drawings and getting things to turn out the way I had imagined, so I would expend a ton of effort for like, 3/4 angle bust on a solid background, you know? Around this time there was a tweet going around with this sad low-res artifacted picture that was just a row of apples, with like, a photo of an apple on one side and an empty space on the other side, and then apples of varying levels of detail and realism in between. And the caption was like, “When you think about an apple, what do you see in your head?” or something like that.
And I was like, “I’m sorry, what?” Because until that moment I did not realize that when people say “mental image,” they mean it literally. I’m the side of the image with nothing in it, not even a crummy little jpeg red splotch of an apple. My brain doesn’t do pictures! If I focus really hard I can kind of conjure up, like, a low quality gif in my mind of something I’ve seen before, but I can’t hang onto it at all or visualize static images in general. And that was how I learned about aphantasia! Which is just… what I’ve described, basically, the inability to visualize things in the mind’s eye.
A little bit later I remembered a piece of prose I wrote when I was 19 or 20, where I was waxing poetic about scent memory and how I have a lot of memories connected very strongly to scent rather than visual memory. My partner was telling me about a local chandler (fancy official term for a person who makes candles) who in fact is so local that they operate out of the back of a jewelry store about a mile from where I live right now, and I was looking at their website to see what scents were there and thinking, “Wow this is pretty neat actually.” My partner said something like, “I called them to see what was up and the guy was like, ‘I’m pouring candles today’,” and I was just the surprised Pikachu picture, because I forgot you can make candles by hand. And that was the eureka moment. Immediately I was like, I want to try this, I can work with scents, I don’t need to visualize anything for that, and then it quickly morphed into realizing that scents could also be fanart. What scents would I associate with such-and-such location or xyz character? Would other people pick up what I was putting down? Could I communicate the thoughts and feelings I had about games and characters just by scent? It was such an intriguing and exciting idea that felt made for me somehow, so I knew what I wanted to do pretty much right then and there, at least conceptually.
Did you start your venture into candlemaking after significant research into the craft, or did you prefer to know just enough to get started and then learn as you go?
Gideon: I did a little bit of research so that I wouldn’t burn my apartment down or anything, but much like with raiding, I really just don’t get things through my skull unless I’m doing them. My partner got me a cheap little candlemaking set off of Amazon for Christmas and I went for it that same night. No idea what the wax was (“soy,” but I highly doubt it was 100% soy), no idea what the wicks were, the fragrance oil was awful, but I was just out there in my kitchen making candles for the first time.
Walk us through the process of workshopping a new candle. What sort of tweaks do you make throughout development, and how do you know when a scent is finalized?
Gideon: The first step, of course, is the inspiration itself. With FFXIV (and everything else that’s come since), I’m thinking about characters and locations. What makes a person or place a good candidate to me is usually “getting a feel” for them in-game; characters we spend a lot of time with, home cities, iconic locations. Then I think “okay, should I go literal with this interpretation or more conceptual or symbolic?” and I spend time mulling on what feels ~*right*~.
For example, Haurchefant and G’raha were two of the first scents I developed. For Haurchefant, I knew immediately that I wanted to use hot chocolate. It’s a simple aroma, but packed with a lot of significance for the character, and it’s a direct reference to the game itself. A friend of mine is a huge Haurchefant fan, so I was like, “What if I found a metal scent?”, and she was like, “DO NOT,” so obviously I did it. I didn’t even know if “metal” was a thing in fragrance, but it is! With G’raha, I started more with a feeling than a clear reference; his character design has always felt “warm” to me, and I wanted to embody these aspects that I felt from him, warmth and playfulness and a little pride and some subtle strength. I didn’t really mean to literally make him a cinnamon roll with the candle, but it was what felt the best in terms of balancing sweetness, spice from the cinnamon and nutmeg, something comfortable and reliable but also, you know, it’s a dessert kind of gourmand fragrance, so it’s a little indulgent as well. I don’t know if that makes sense but it’s how I thought about it. Sometimes if I’m stuck with a vague concept or a feeling I’ll just browse some of my suppliers’ sites and look at fragrance oils until something sticks.
The next step after deciding what I want the scent to be is finding the fragrance oils to make it happen. I use a lot of various suppliers because basically once I get an idea I will scour the whole internet to find what I need for it. Usually I’ll get a small quantity, just one or two ounces, of each new fragrance oil, and then use fragrance blotter strips (same as you’d use to test perfume) to let the oils dry down and see how the scent develops. You can also kind of simulate a blend by taking a few of those strips and waving them under your nose, haha. At that point I’ll usually want to make a test candle, in whatever container I’m going to be using. There are a lot of variables in candlemaking. The fragrance, wax, any dyes used, and the container all affect what size wick you use. I didn’t even know there were different kinds of wicks until I started this. So making a tester is the starting point for any tweaks that need to be made. I can find out if the wick is too small or too big for that combination of wax and fragrance in that container, I can find out how strong the scent is when the candle is unlit (“cold throw”) and when lit (“hot throw”), and a bunch of other things. There’s a lot to keep track of. When I started I took TONS of notes. Sometimes I need to change something about the scent or change the percentage of oil in the recipe, or any number of teeny fiddly things.
After settling on the combination of amount of fragrance and wick size that work best for the container I’m using, then I can go back, get a bunch of the fragrance oil, and make the rest of them. That’s very “draw a circle, then draw the rest of the owl,” but it’s pretty straightforward once you hit that winning recipe.
Now that you’ve created quite a few candles, have you developed a “scent shorthand,” per se, or a few go-to base combinations, that have expedited or improved developing a final product? Or does each new candle start from scratch?
Gideon: I have a kind of “standard” recipe–I have a go-to container, a wax that I like (and a wax that I don’t like but nobody can tell I don’t like it… until now, I guess), a brand of wicks that are easy for me to work with, and a normal amount of everything that I’m used to working with, and I use that as a starting point for almost everything. At this point I can kind of guess if I’ll need to wick up or wick down, or if a dye is going to inhibit the burn, that kind of thing, so I don’t need to test as extensively. These days if I’m making a new scent in my normal tin for a 6-ounce candle, I’ll make one, burn it for 4-6 hours to see if it melts like it’s supposed to and if the hot throw is satisfactory, and if so, proceed with the rest of the batch; if no, adjust and try again.
If I’m using a different container like a glass jar or a ceramic tumbler or something, I go back to longer test phases with note-taking and everything, because I need to really verify it’ll burn safely and cleanly with a nice strong scent.
What aspect of a character serves as the biggest inspiration for you when crafting either a canon character candle, or a custom Warrior of Light candle?
Gideon: Like I mentioned above, canon characters can sometimes start with general vibes I get from them, and sometimes if a character demonstrates a fondness for a certain thing that lends itself well to a scent (things like specific flowers, tobacco, food, etc.) I’ll see if I can craft a scent around that. Custom scents are a little harder because I don’t know most people’s characters really intimately, and that intimacy and familiarity is important for me most of the time. But I can often ask if commissioners have scents they associate with their characters, or a specific mood they want to convey, and that’s always a great starting point. Barring that, I can usually glean enough from character descriptions to start throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, especially when people get really descriptive about specific behaviors and motivations–stuff that makes the character really them.
Does the name of a candle ever change after you’ve finished it, or is the name more often a starting point?
Gideon: I don’t think I’ve ever changed a name before, because they don’t normally have any relation to the scent itself and are more indicative of what the scent was inspired by, like the city-state candles being named after their musical themes. Another thing is in-game titles or quotes, such as Emet-Selch’s Shadowbringers candle being called “A Thousand Thousand Lifetimes” after the line, “I have lived a thousand thousand of your lifetimes!” just because it really struck me when I heard it for the first time. Occasionally the name comes first, like with the Sin Eater candle, “Wicked White,” which I just thought would be a really metal name for a candle. Sometimes something pops into my head and I’m like, “w\Well fine, now I have to make a candle about it.” Another one of those is in the Dragon Age collection I’m working on–“City of Chains.” It just sounds cool so I roll with it.
You release some of your candles in limited, unique jars, rather than the usual metal tin or as melts. What sets apart these candles from your other releases? Are you inspired first by the jar itself, or do you decide ahead of time which candles will have a unique container?
Gideon: It varies. With the Indulgence collection, which was all Shadowbringers scents, it was what I intended to be the end of the greater FFXIV set, so I really wanted to go ham. I worked on them for almost a year, sourcing the fancy jars and being extra picky about fragrance blends, and released them on my birthday, and it was supposed to be a big last hurrah before I started moving on to other projects, so I knew going into it that I was going to hunt for a bunch of nice jars to go with these scents I was conceptualizing. Endwalker kind of rendered all that moot because I had a new set for it within a week of finishing MSQ, but still. The candles as functional objects are the same as the others, but I go at the presentation with more gusto.
Sometimes I’ll see a vessel and immediately get an impression that it would go great with X character or Y location, though, or I’ll just really like a certain style of container and then tuck it into my back pocket and the inspiration matches up later, like right now there’s a really nice style of matte colored tin that I’m waiting for the perfect opportunity to use.
What different materials have you worked with, and why do you prefer the materials you currently use? Are there any methods or materials you haven’t used yet that you would like to try?
Gideon: I have tried a lot of stuff in the relatively short time I’ve been doing this! I started out using 100% soy wax because it’s the most accessible and I’d heard that it was cleaner and safer than paraffin (which isn’t really the case, but that’s an interview for another day), but I got tired of trying to deal with its most common pitfall, which is that it’s ugly. It gets all textured and forms microcrystals after you melt it and it’s a pain to get the tops smooth and it’s notorious for not holding dye and having weak hot throw. It works for some chandlers, but it wasn’t for me. I tried 100% paraffin as well, and that was worse, because it’s very, very soft–as a petroleum byproduct, it’s comparable in texture to petroleum jelly/Vaseline, and it melts and cools very quickly so it can be difficult to work with. The hot throw is very strong and it dyes like nobody’s business, but it’s messy and kind of translucent so I didn’t like that either. My favorite wax is what’s known as a parasoy, which of course is a blend of paraffin and soy waxes. There are a few formulations of pre-blended parasoy out there, the most popular being about 70% paraffin and 30% soy, which makes its overall characteristics more like paraffin. The one I prefer is very close to 50/50, with the slight majority being soy, so I get the nice creamy opaque finish of soy but without the frosting and texturing, and with better hot throw. I have favorite wicks that work well with my favorite wax, and my standard 6-ounce tin is easy to get in bulk.
I’ve also used other waxes, with my favorites being apricot/coconut blends and coconut/soy blends. One wax that I haven’t tried at all yet is beeswax! I always hear that it’s really difficult to wick beeswax, so I’ve stayed away from it, but I really want to try someday.
What are some combinations that you thought would work well but did not turn out as you hoped, and what are some combinations that surprised you with how well they married together?
Gideon: I have had blessedly few abject failures, haha. The worst one I ever had was when I was testing scents for the Zenos candle, and the first fragrance oil I tried was a dupe/re-creation of Very Sexy For Men by Victoria’s Secret, partly because I really wanted a distinctly masculine cologne type of feel, and partly because it was funny. It was fine in the bottle and when I put it on a blotter strip, but when I burned the test candle I was like, “Wait a second, I hate this.” I couldn’t stand it! Nothing in the notes for that fragrance suggested it but all I got was Christmas vibes, for whatever reason, and it was so wrong for what I was looking for that I just trashed it. Terrible.
My unexpected successes are mostly based in “weird” scent notes making their way into things. I use a lot of things like plywood, cement, drywall, dust, that kind of novelty stuff. I always thought that it’d be like the uncanny valley of scents, but every time I’ve done it, it just works. I have one coming up that’s just the scent of ozone and nothing else, and it smells like nothing in particular. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
What is your personal favorite candle (or type of scent) that you’ve created, and why?
Gideon: Visually, my favorite one that I’ve made is the Ultima Thule candle, “Shadow and Shade.” That was a case of seeing a vessel and immediately knowing exactly what I needed to put in it. It was a fun scent, too; it uses a fragrance oil called “Scent of Space,” which is based on an astronaut’s description of the scent on his helmet after a space walk. It was really unique and almost kind of confusing to the nose, and I was really happy with how everything just coalesced for that one.
My favorite scents that I’ve created are all sort of in the same family; I found that I really enjoy scents that have a lot of emphasis on notes like amber and tonka bean, especially combined with “dry” scents like tobacco leaf and bay leaf. I also really like spices, and especially peppercorn, which sounds like it should be unpleasant, but it’s one of my favorite little kicks in a fragrance. “My Enemy, My Friend,” “Indulgence,” “Vermillion Scourge,” and “White Snow, Black Steel” are all prime examples of that type of scent profile.
Like any art form, your candles are not created in an objective void. How do you weave yourself, as the creator, into a craft like candlemaking?
Gideon: The heart of the whole thing for me has pretty much been “non-visual illustration,” such as it is. Not visualizing things in my mind informs how I receive and recall information, and scent is a huge part of how I experience the world, so I really set out to do art that’s invisible, and communicate thoughts, feelings, and concepts to others through fragrance. It’s a way of sharing the way that I perceive these beloved characters and locations.
What is an unexpectedly difficult part of the process that most people probably wouldn’t assume by looking at your finished products?
Gideon: Personally, I had no idea there were so many variables in candlemaking. The major hurdle starting out was the amount of testing required. There are so many different types of materials and supplies you can use and the only way to find out what works best for you is to just try things, but where do you even start? With wicks alone I can pick from the ECO series, the CD series, the Premier 700 series, the HTP series, zinc cores, hemp wicks, and wooden wicks, with up to 22 sizes per series. That was the biggest surprise for me and has been for people I’ve shared my processes with, just that there isn’t a simple one-size-fits-all method of making candles and that so much relies on trial and error.
Now that you’ve carved a pretty solid niche in the FFXIV fandom with your candles, are there other crafting ventures you would like to explore?
Gideon: Yes! I want to stay adjacent to scents in general, and I’ve thought about adapting some of the candle scents to reed diffusers, and eventually I want to select the body-safe blends to use in products like solid perfume and lotion bars. Wear your video game husband/wife directly on your body!
What is one skill you learned from your previous work that helped you pick up candlemaking? What is a skill from your candles that you will carry forward into future projects?
Gideon: At the very least I knew I’d be able to design logos, haha. I’m not an incredible graphic designer but I like what I’ve been able to make for the candles.
Less creatively, the candle venture is teaching me a lot about time and resource management, and how to temper my chronic “doing too many” disease. I have almost 40 FFXIV-themed scents! The Dragon Age collection has 24! It’s not sustainable and I need to stop! Being able to better allocate my energy, finances, and time is a net gain, though, and no matter where I go from here I’m sure that’ll be useful.
You’ve talked about how encouraging the FFXIV Crafter Hangout Discord channel has been for you. How has creating in a close community been in contrast to creating more within your own space?
Gideon: It’s like night and day. The community in the Crafter Hangout server is just this hub of anything you could need: resources for finding manufacturers, tutorials, tips from other people in your same field, troubleshooting, design feedback, general praise… and just good people to chat with, who are all enthusiastic about creating and about other people’s creations. You can’t get that on your own, and I certainly didn’t have that level of encouragement coming just from within myself. I absolutely would not have been able to boost myself to the level of confidence I have in my ideas without that network. It’s also something of an ideas marketplace– like when we all went nuts over squapes. So many people did squapes merch and we all fed off each other’s enthusiasm and workshopped ideas together, and I think that kind of collaborative process is really special, and another thing that you can’t have when you’re just keeping to yourself.
Thank you so much for taking the time to tell us so much about your craft! Last but not least, tell us about your Warrior (or Warriors) of Light! What is your favorite way to spend time in Eorzea?
Gideon: Thank you so much for asking such thoughtful questions! It’s been a delight!
My Warrior of Light, A’neqa Tia, is a dumb jock with a heart of gold. He’s very much a class clown type who projects an air of just kind of partying through his life without thinking, but since embarking on this adventure he’s learned a lot about the ugliness in the world and has had maybe a little too much time to mull on all that, so as of the end of the 6.0 story he’s a little less with the jokes and more with the navel-gazing about what he’s living for.
Personally, I am a crafter and gpose main, which seems apropos. I love in-game photography of both characters and environments, and binge crafting is a great way to work out a nonspecific desire to create things. I also am in my first static with a bunch of fellow baby raiders, and we recently started doing savage prog for the first time, which has honestly been a blast, even if my monk rotation is embarrassing right now.
You can find Gideon, aka Luminis Candle Co., on Twitter, support them through their online shop or Patreon, or check out their work on their website!
Inquiries of Art 
Leave a comment