Fire & Smoke tutorial for screenshot art (Photoshop)
 

Hai!!!

I remember learning this method years ago from ScreenShotArt (ScreenShotWorld these days),
but it seems the tutorial has vanished and is not available anymore, so I decided
to do a remake of it.

The first post will be about making fire, the smoke bit is quite similar to this
one, but I'll go over that too tomorrow.

Right then.

1. Choose the Chalk 17px brush (should be there by default) and add scattering and spacing via the brush settings panel. I used 65% spacing with 325% scattering.

http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/...owly/01-17.jpg
http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/...owly/02-17.jpg

2. Pick a appropriate color to use as the base for the fire and using the brush we set up, draw the basic shape of the fire. (doesn't have to be perfect, you can add to it later on)

http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/...owly/03-16.jpg
http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/...owly/04-10.jpg

3. Take out the smudge tool and choose a soft round brush (strength = 35% worked fine for me). Start smudging the fire to give it a wispy shape, try to follow the flow of the structure. (smaller brush = more detail)

http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/Dowly/05-7.jpg

4. Start adding more layers on top of the base and smudge in small amounts of different colors to give the fire more texture and detail. IIRC, I use total of 6 different colors + some black to give back some details in the center area.

This took around 4 minutes to do, it doesn't look very pretty...
http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/Dowly/06-6.jpg

But you can always use layer blend modes to spice it up. ;)
http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/Dowly/07-4.jpg


That pretty much covers the fire, not much more to it. Just make the basic
shape with the customized brush, smudge it and start blending other colors in.

I'll get the smoke tutorial out tomorrow at some point. :yep:

Le Smóke (I'm sure that's french)

1. Firstly you want to make a helper line, from the source of the smoke to the end. Tends to make it easier in the long run. :hmmm:

http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/Dowly/s01.jpg

2. Using the same brush we used with fire, choose the first color for the smoke. This will be the overall color or the base color of the smoke. As the background is quite light in my shot, I go with almost black.

http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/Dowly/s02.jpg

3. Brush in the smoke all along the helper line, sort of a side to side method have worked the best for me when applying the first color, the shape is more random that way. Also, the smaller the brush the better, but don't go too small, think I used 8-10 here. Also, make the center of the smoke thicker, so you can't see through it.

http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/Dowly/S03.jpg

4. Next, take out the smudge tool and smudge the smoke, I used the same settings as with the fire. We'll smudge the first color twice, the first time we just make it smoother and remove all the sharpness caused by the brush (blur filter might work here too)...

http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/Dowly/S04.jpg

... and the second time, I like to make the smoke look a bit like a feather, pushing the smoke outwards with short fast strokes. Gives it a nice wispy look.

http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/Dowly/s05.jpg

5. For the first color, now we just need to duplicate the layer, pop it beneath the original and give it gaussian blur, in this case I went with 15.

http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/Dowly/s06.gif

6. The last thing to do with smoke is what we did with fire: add different shades of grey to it on new layers and smudge them in. I used 2 new layers, the first being only slightly lighter shade, with larger brush I added just a little bit of it in few spots, the second color was much lighter shade which I applied with smaller (5-7) brush all along the top of the smoke to simulate light coming from above.

That's it for the smoke, really. Experiment around and with some time spent it can be made to look very nice. :yep:

Here's the finished tutorial shot with added layer blending (color dodge @ 60% for fire and screenshot). Total time was around 11 minutes on this.

http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/Dowly/s07.jpg

Shouldn't that be a British or a French plane.:D

In perfect world, yes. In not so, that's my DR1 after accidentally "attacking" three
Sopwith Camels thinking they were the rest of my flight.. they weren't. :shifty:

Thanks Dowly. I'm saving this for future reference. :salute:

I don't think I need the tutorial, most of my aircraft already have this flame and smoke feature. :cry:

Thanks :yeah: I'll see if I can find some free time to play with this this afternoon.

Nice post downy.

Tyvm. May come in handy some day.

It helps to evade the enemy once in awhile. :O:


Like I should be one to talk... :shifty: