The (not so) finished product. I actually made quite a few of these suckers.
Items Needed:
- PVC pipe at varying lengths (odd numbers and staggered heights looks best)
- high temp glue gun and plenty of sticks
- a can of Great Stuff
- battery operated tea lights
- white or ivory spray paint
- Mod Podge or elmers glue
- cheap paintbrushes
- brown and black acrylic paint
1. Pump various lengths of PVC pipe (with a large enough diameter to fit a battery operated tealight) full of some Great Stuff. Just a squirt will do the job, it expands to eleventybillion times its size. Once dry, use a serrated knife to saw off the excess.
2. Using a high-temp hot glue gun, apply drips of glue from the top of the pvc pipe "candle" dripping downward. More layers look grody and spooky, but if you're going for a Christmas display or non-spooky holiday centerpiece, you might want to just do a few drips.
3. I spray painted the entirety of the candles an ivory for an authentic candle look and to hide any writing on the candles. If these are longterm you might want to apply a light coat of Rustoleum Primer before spraypainting for added durability. If you don't have spray paint handy you can do what I did with this little prototype and just simply brush on ivory metallic paint. It takes a bit longer but use what you got! Also, you can't spray paint the Great Stuff foam because it melts it, so just go ahead and coat it with some ivory paint.
4. I mixed a bit of Mod Podge (classic Elmer's would do the job) with some brown paint to make it look more like a glaze. You could also use actual glaze if you had that hangin' around. Using a cheap stiff brush (stiff gets into crevices better) I painted over the "drips" so that I could get in between them making a nice rustic, old looking "shadow". For not so spooky candles, water your brown down much more with Mod Podge. 
5. Once you have continued on with this, I went in with yet another layer of the dark glaze. The photo on the left shows where I could have stopped, after I rubbed some of the glaze off the top, leaving only what was in the crevices. You could dry brush some ivory glaze made in the same manner lightly over the top if you are making slightly old looking non-spookified candles. I went in hard with the grody stuff, because, well, Halloween, dude!
6. I made a black glaze with a tiny bit of black paint in a whole lotta Mod Podge, and used my brush to put it only here and there beneath the drips at the top. I very lightly dry brushed it from left to right (left photo) so that it only settled into one side of the drips, creating a shadow.
7. NOT PICTURED: I don't have a photo because my husband did this for me, what a doll, but you essentially carve out a little space for your battery operated tealight to sit inside all snug. When it comes time to light up the display, you pop them out, turn them on, and sit them back into place.
Extra TIP! If you are brave, and the surface you are decorating isn't delicate, you can up the spook factor of your scene by arranging the candles, then turning on your high temp glue gun and lightly pressing the trigger while flicking your wrist back and forth. If you do this about a foot to two feet above your candle scene, strings of hot glue will be so thin that they will cool off in the air and cascade on your arrangement. They look much more like spiderwebs than the stuff they sell in a bag.
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