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Hi there
i am having some difficulty painting free hand fire. I have a good selection of reds, oranges , yellows and whites for doing this but was wondering if anybody had a sure fire( forgive the pun) easy technique for this? I have tried on a few practice models and they look gash, i want to use it in the leg section of some power armour , form the feet rising to under the knee joint. Any help would be amazing. Thanks

I think wet blending would be good for this, blending from darker reds at the base of the flames up through oranges, yellows, and finally whites at the very tip. I'm not much good at it myself, but I have seen some decent tutorials on you tube, try there.

Wet blending would be the ideal technique for fire, but it is possible to do well with layering, if wet blending gives you problems, the more layers and the greater the similarity between the layers the closer it gets to blending.

You can do fire as red to yellow or yellow to red. I think it's personal preference as to which is better.

What about your fire looks wrong to you?

 Col. Kurtz wrote:
I think wet blending would be good for this, blending from darker reds at the base of the flames up through oranges, yellows, and finally whites at the very tip. I'm not much good at it myself, but I have seen some decent tutorials on you tube, try there.

If you want to paint something to reflect actual flames, you will want to have white in the middle going to yellow then red.

I have a sergeant centurius model i am painting for a friend (see my other post about centurius) i have tried a few times and it just looks rubbish maybe taling a long time slowly building layer upon layer is the way. cheers will have alook on you tube as well

Use wet blending to get the colour transition. You can either use some thick paint of this, since it'll take longer to dry, or a drying retarder.
This should help.

Another thing I've got to recommend is fluorescent paints. Vallejo makes a line of them, but there are several other manufacturers. It REALLY helps when trying to paint flames themselves, but I imagine they'd be great for freehand flames as well. I will note, however, that they have terrible coverage so you'll need a LOT of layers with them. I think it's worth it though, as they really make the flames pop because they're so bright. There are several tutorials out there for them, and some really fantastic examples. I did the torch on this one with fluorescents.



And again, if you want your freehand flames to be more realistic, they should start white (the 'hottest' color) at the middle/bottom and transition through yellow to orange to red (the 'coolest') at the very tips.

Great tips mate!

Go to your local shop and take a look through the Menoth book for Warmachine. They have some great painting tips for flames and make it look really easy. I've had very good success following those instructions.