In this Photoshop tutorial, I’ll show you how you can make a lit candle from shapes. These basic techniques can be applied to many different situations, and the fire technique can be adopted for any image that requires flame.

We’ll start with the fire first, and then move onto the actual candle.

Our base shape that we’ll start from is a flower shape available from the Custom Shapes dropdown box. As you can see, I’ve set the background to black, and used red as the fill color for the symbol:

Use an outer glow set to 25px, and the following inner glow on our shape:

Next, let’s group the layer into a smart object and rasterize the layer. This will allow us to user Filter > Distort > Ripple (which I have set to 617% for amount and size Medium)

With the filter ran, the last thing to do to the flame is to use Edit > Transform > Warp to shape it. I start warping like this:

After a few times warping, then applying the warp and doing it again, I’ve ended up with a nice flame like this:

The final step then is to create the candle and the wick, both of which I ended up creating as rectangle shapes and then used the warp tool to make them look like they’re shaped imperfectly. I used brushes set to various shades of grey and white to achieve the wax look:

And that’s all there is to it. Quick, simple, and effective; what more could you ask for?