Making Fire...In Drawings

Issue #16

A Matter of Style

Fire. We know it. We use it. It pops up as something you might have to draw sometimes. When you’re making a comic that features magic as a main element of the story, drawing fire becomes an eventuality.

So how did I handle fire in my previous comics?

Oh.

Ugh...

Okay, I can’t take any credit for these ones. I’d found a paintbrush that did them for me at this point.

Which brings me to a point of contention in the art world: when do you do something yourself and when do you let someone else do it for you?

When it comes to tedious details like patterns on clothing or brick textures, no one’s usually that bothered if you used an image texture to make it for you. An artist’s time is precious, and some of us don’t have the time or patience to draw a plaid texture by hand or every cobblestone along a road. And usually no one is going to be too butthurt if you didn’t actually draw the trees in your background.

I think where the line begins to show itself is around elements that affect the style of your art.

I have sort of a pet peeve when I’m reading a comic or watching an anime. It really bothers me when I see something on the panel or frame that is so jarringly not in style with the rest of the image. This usually happens when someone has clearly and poorly used a 3D rendered item in their 2D work, or they’ve used pre-made assets or textures that don’t fit with the style of their work.

Again, I understand that not every artist has the time or resources to draw everything themselves, and I can respect that, but when it starts becoming obvious that you’re not doing your own work, I can’t imagine ever being truly happy with myself as an artist.

It’s why I resisted using effect brushes for the most part. But I cracked when I saw how bad my fire effects looked compared to everything else. And as someone who was usually on a mental deadline to get a new chapter out every seven to twelve days, I didn’t have the time to sit and properly teach myself how to draw fire.

Until now.

Starting Small

To get started with my fire studies, I decided to start with the simplest flames I could think of: candle flames.

Pro tip: when you’re first learning how to draw something, try to find the simplest version of it as a starting point. I’m sure even someone who doesn’t consider themselves an artist can agree they’d rather draw a little candle flame than a roaring bonfire to start.

Starting small like this gave me a chance to hone in on the simplest elements of a flame. I started by looking up images of candlelight and drawing the blocks of color I saw.

They don’t look very pretty, but they demonstrate a few patterns we can identify with fire.

First is that obvious teardrop shape. Your standard fire tends to start thicker at the bottom, where its fuel source is, and taper as it goes upward. The second is its color.

Ready for some fire facts?

The color of a flame indicates its temperature and the efficiency of its burn. If I ask you to think about a fire, the first colors that likely came to your mind were orange, yellow, or red. These colors represent the spectrum of moderate and low-temperature fires, with red flames being the coolest and colors like orange, yellow and white being progressively hotter.

Blue fire is where some of the hottest temperatures are. It indicates the area where the most efficient fuel burning is taking place. In the case of a candle, it makes sense to see a little edge of blue along the bottom right by the fuel source: the candle wax. You’ll also often see blue flames when igniting a fuel source like gas coming out of a Bunsen burner. The more efficient the fuel delivery, the hotter the flames.

So what do these little flames teach us about fire?

The further the flame is from the center, the cooler it gets. Notice how many of these flames have a ring of orange around them, indicating the furthest, coolest edges of the flame.

The closer you get to the center, the lighter the color becomes, until you’re usually seeing yellows and whites in the middle of the flame, indicating the flame is hotter toward the center.

But what about those dark patches, you may be asking. What’s going on there?

That’s the candlewick. Fun fact, the wick of a candle isn’t a fuel source. It’s an ignition source. Meaning all it was meant to do was give the flame somewhere to start before it began to burn its real fuel source: the wax.

What you’re seeing is often a combination of the silhouette of the candlewick inside the fire and a spot where there’s less efficient fuel burning happening because the wick is in the way of the flame burning more wax. Less efficient burning means lower temperatures. Lower temperatures means the presence of red or even dark red flames, like what we get here.

You may have also noticed, then, that candles that burn with a wick as the ignition source tend to have a little divot at the bottom where, again, since the wick isn’t a fuel source, there’s nothing to burn, so you end up with this little patch of space where there’s no fire. The absence of the divot is either a case of the flame being more stylized in its drawing or indicates a gas burning flame, like in the case of the last one which is a flame burning from something like a Bunsen burner.

These blocky flames are not particularly pleasing to the eye, and certainly not how I intend to draw flames in my work. In fact, I was so bothered by how weird they looked when I was done that I decided to try something.

I duplicated the layer and went to the smudge tool. Real fire isn’t blocky like this. The edges can be surprisingly defined, but everything inside tends to be more seamlessly connected. So, with alpha lock on to keep the flames within the bounds of my drawings, I set to work smudging all those colors together.

Now that looks pretty neat. I added a little extra glow effect around the edges, as it was something I saw in the references. And I did blur the outer edges a bit afterward. These look more like flames.

Now that I felt like I understood the structure of a flame better, I decided to ramp it up a notch by specifically looking for examples of flames with two tails instead of one.

The Pattern of Fire

Once you get out of the realm of tiny candleflames, fires only get larger. The larger a fire gets, the more haphazard and undefined its shape becomes. Certainly if you look at photos of real life campfires, you may find it difficult to describe the shapes going on.

So I’m doing the next phase of my research in the realm on un-reality. I’m relying on good old cartoon drawings of fire to see what people take away from a fire as it gets bigger.

I specifically looked for images of fire where there were only two ends. A basic candlelight has only one in that teardrop shape usually. As a fire gets bigger, it starts to branch and waver a lot more. I wanted to start getting an idea of how those wavers worked before getting into drawing bigger fires.

That got me here. Once again, I used blocks of color, and though I used all the same colors here, I kept the color order from what I’d been seeing. In general, a cartoon flame tends to have a white center base that radiates out to yellow, orange, then red.

The shape of these flames varied. Sometimes a flame kept that teardrop outline and added an extra branch. Others I would describe as more like trapezoids, with thicker bottoms and smaller tops, but still distinctly blocky compared to a teardrop.

The insides of the flames interested me. In general, cartoon drawings favored making smaller and smaller versions of the flame shape receding toward the center. I knew this was a particular habit of cartoon drawings. Real flames, as you can tell just by looking at the candlelights, don’t really do this. But it’s a simplification that’s become accepted by people as still being “flame-like”.

I did the smudging technique again just to see how it would look, and after some playing around I could see how that simplified version came to be.

These still look pretty good, even taking into consideration how simple they started. There’s clearly something these basic flames understand about real fire.

But that uniformity of the flames was really bothering me. Some of them worked for smaller flames, but I couldn’t shake that feeling that I was working below my potential.

I decided it was time to take what I’d learned so far and draw some bigger flames.

Campfire Time

For this, I looked up cartoon images of campfires. It ramped up the complexity of the flame shape pretty quickly, but, as you can see, the basic color principle remained the same: lighter colors in the middle, redder colors on the outside.

The biggest thing I’d noticed during these studies was how many of these fires retained a sort of triangular shape. They all started with the same idea of a thicker base around where the fuel for the fire was and tapered upward from there.

The random branches of fire still generally kept to this triangular shape, with some exceptions branching further out to add visual intrigue.

I’ll be honest, making the branches is still the hardest thing for me. I don’t know what’s broken in my brain that I’m not particularly good at making curved, fire-like shapes. Something always looks off and I still don’t think I’ve figured out what’s wrong yet.

In any case, I was feeling better about the look of these flames. I was starting to adlib the references I was using and still managing to get something that looked decent.

Then, as I’ve been doing, I smudged them to see how they look. The addition of more random shapes is definitely helping the fire look. But it’s clear that these are still very cartoonish.

Which, I’ll be honest, I don’t mind. I think for the aesthetic of my comic, I want hand-drawn, more cartoon-ish looking flames. I didn’t set out with the intent to learn to draw fire realistically, though I’d certainly like to eventually get there.

I felt like this was a good stopping point for now. It’s important to take breaks when studying to give yourself time to internalize what you’ve learned and see if there’s anything you’d like to do differently.

For me, I was feeling more and more confident that I wanted to learn how to draw stylized fire for my comic, which meant looking into more specific examples of stylized fire and learning to draw from there. That will be the topic of next week’s newsletter.

I’ll be perfectly honest, these newsletters eat a lot more of my week than I anticipated between the studies, the writing, and the video making. I don’t want to stop by any means. I’m seeing huge amounts of progress in my skills from doing these. However, progress on the remake of The Chosen One’s Mentor has definitely taken a backseat to getting a newsletter ready every week, and that bothers me. I still really want to get my comic re-published by New Years, but I need to refocus my energy if I’m going to make that happen.

So, going forward, expect shorter newsletters. That means less weekly reading for you and ideally less of a workload for me. Unless I get really into a topic. Which I know can happen since I’m quite verbose in writing. We’ll see. At the very least, I’ve lessened how much study work I expect myself to produce over the course of a week and that should help free up some time.

Of course, I’m still holding myself to making a painting a week, so I’ll wrap up there as normal.

Painting of the Week

Okay, I’m going to take you on a brief journey with this painting, because it pretty much encapsulates the huge difference in skill level you can see when you’re working in and out of your element.

I consider myself a pretty competent artist, both on the computer and with a pencil in hand. Painting, however, has come to show me just how unrefined some of my skills are. Specifically when it comes to painting straight or confident lines.

I set out to paint my favorite coffee mug for this week. It seemed like a simple enough topic while still challenging me to work on my rendering skills. I decided on a gray background for my black and white coffee mug and set to work.

I decided to get the form of the coffee mug down, I would start by painting in the shadow under the cup, the black lip, and then connecting the two with white and starting the handle.

Here’s what that turned out like.

Yes. It genuinely was this bad. I have no excuses for how I made such a cartoonishly terrible looking mug besides the one thing that quickly became evident to me as I was starting.

I do not have a confident hand.

In my sketchbooks, my art is small. I can leave the side of my hand on the paper and work by moving my wrist to draw. In digital, I can endlessly zoom in and out and use tools to help steady my line work. I also have an artist glove that lets me rest my hand on the tablet for added stability.

When painting, I can’t leave my hand on the canvas for stability and there are no digital tools to save me. I have to hold my arm up and move from the elbow to paint. I got decent at this from having to do it for years in college, but college was many years ago and those skills have definitely rusted.

I was able to hide this lack of refinement behind messy work and pieces that were more organic and didn’t require hard edges. But now that I was painting something solid with an identifiable shape, it was clear that I was missing some skills.

I was so unhappy with this that for the first time ever I painted over my canvas completely to start anew. And I rethought my process.

When you’re drawing still life, you’re supposed to look for shapes. Shapes like cubes, cylinders, and pyramids help you render the right shapes and help with understanding shading. A mug is, obviously, just a cylinder. I should start by focusing on that cylinder shape.

So I started again, but I went in the opposite direction. Instead of starting with the shadows and dark parts, I started by rendering a white cylinder as best as I could with an angle brush. Now that I was working with a single block rather than trying to connect two separate arcs, the results were way better.

This was something I could work with. This was a base that let me build neatly on top of it.

I then went into the zone so I neglected to take pictures of the rest of the progress, but, needless to say, I’m a lot happier with how this one turned out than how the first one was starting.

Granted, my lack of confident line work still made this messier than I wanted. The lines are wonky, and it’s still pretty unrefined. It became very clear very quickly that I need to work on steadying my hand if I want to get better at this. That takes practice.

There isn’t some magical tip or trick that will suddenly make your lines steady. I know the trick to use your whole arm to paint. I know the trick to go fast when making big curves. But, at the end of the day, those are just tools layered atop hours and hours of practice to increase your confidence in your strokes. That’s when your line work will become cleaner. So, there’s nothing left to do but keep practicing.

I hope if you take anything from this painting of the week, it’s that even artists who have been working for decades can still have weak areas. That’s been part of the fun of painting. Everything I’ve done I could easily do in an art program and they would turn out nice. But there’s something far more satisfying to seeing your skills develop right before your eyes as you pursue something that you’re admittedly not great at, but you’re actively trying to get better at. I think that can apply to anything, not just art.

And that’s all for this week, gang. Thanks for reading.