Gargoyle Illumination

Having invested considerable time and money into gargoyles, it would be a shame if you couldn't see them.

Design
Lamp Selection
Construction
Regrets
Related Pages

Design

We wobbled all over the map on how to do this. All that we knew going in was that the garge needed to be lit from the bottom. Up-lighting at an oblique angle casts shadows everywhere, making the gargs look more sinister.

Plan B was always to use landscape "stake" lights on the ground, shining up. The problem is that the landscape lights are fairly clunky, and putting them outside the fence might cause people to trip over them or step on them. That's why it was plan B.

The ideal would be one or two tiny lights, mounted on sticks extending from the base of each garg.

Lamp Selection

With the lamps extending from the base, we still had to decide what lind of lamps to use.

A strong contender was the miniature halogen reflector lamps. The down-side is that they consume considerable power, get hot, usually run off of 12 Volts (an additional power supply per garg), and might actually be too bright.

We decided that super-bright light emitting diodes (LEDs) would be better. They run cool, can run off the same power supply as the gargoyle's flickering eyes, and are available in various brightness levels and beam angles.

Unfortunately, there was no time to fire off an order to one of the electronic supply houses, so I was limited to stock on hand. I went through every LED I had, visually inspecting them, checking the characteristics, and testing a few of a garg.

I suggest the following selection criteria:

water-clear package or light transparent tinting - no diffused LEDs
Diffused LEDs light up themselves, and cast a uniform glow around the area. They don't project a clear beam.
high brightness
I actually found some that were too bright.
medium beam angle (~45 degrees)
Since the LED lamps are close to the gargs, you need an angle like 45 degrees to cover face and wings. Some of the brighter LEDs I had looked like little spotlights that would only cover the nose.
creepy color
Almost any color can be creepy if used right. I was looking mostly at red (bloody), and green (moldy).

I found a surprisingly large number of candidates, including a sickly yellowish-green that almost won.

Eventually, I decided for a two-tone approach: A red light on one side and green on the other. The two LEDs can be placed in series with a resistor (18 Ohm, 1/4 Watt) and get power from the same 4.5 VDC wall wart that powers the flickering eyes. This setup should run approximately 30 mA through the LEDs.

Construction

We decided to mount the lights at the end of wire "wands" that protrude from the base of the garg and cast illumination back on it.

[photo] This picture of the end of a wand shows the LED attached to it.

[photo] The end of each wand is bent in a gentle curve back, so that if somebody is tall enough and stupid enough to walk into one, it won't poke his eye out.

A piece of PVC pipe is used as a form to bend the wand.

[photo] These are the lighting components used in all five gargs: two eyes and two illumination wands.

Regrets

The specific LEDs were selected to provide enough illumination, but not too much, over the fairly wide area of face and wings.

I liked the effect during testing: nice, subtle.

But on Halloween, it proved too subtle. Heck, most people were so dense that they didn't even notice the flapping wings when you were shining a flashlight on the garg!

It comes back to the issue of being either subtle or cartoon-like.

Please visit our other gargoyle pages:

Thank you for visiting. Your comments are welcome.
. . . . . .