How to Make Napalm Explosion Markers

We received many comments from viewers on the Vietnam episode last week asking about our napalm explosion markers. These were hand-crafted for the game using some very basic supplies and, in this tutorial, we'll show you how to make some of your own! Let's start with the basic shopping list of what you'll need to make your markers:

FLICKERING TEA LIGHTS
WHITE PILLOW STUFFING
PIPE CLEANERS
CLEAR TRANSPARENCY SHEET
SCISSORS
BLACK SPRAY PAINT
GREY CRAFT PAINT 
CRAFT GLUE

You can click on any of the photos above to zoom in and get a closer look, but the core of your flickering explosion marker is a tea light, ringed in about a 1" tall piece of plastic transparency paper. You can secure this with tape for now. The key here is that you want the tea light to be loose enough to slide out of the transparency ring in case you need to replace it. For taller, more dramatic explosions, I stacked two tea lights on top of each other. 

Then tease out some puff balls of pillow batting and shape them into suitable explosions. I covered the outside of the transparency sheets in white Elmer's craft glue and surrounded this inner core with pillow stuffing. To hold the stuffing in place long enough for the glue to dry, I simply used rubber bands for a few hours. 

I used pipe cleaners to add some white trails bursting out of the napalm cloud. It would have been smart to use WHITE pipe cleaners but I only had green. This meant I needed to slather them with white paint. 

Next, spray paint your white pillow batting explosion with blank, highlight with some gray paint, and you're nearly done. For the final step, I hot glued half a dozen pipe cleaners into the explosion. It does help to study photos of actual napalm explosions to get some inspiration for how to shape your pillow stuffing. This was a very easy project and cost less than $10 to make a pair of markers.