So I had this cool character from two years ago at the Texas Photo Festival in Smithville, Texas and I’ve been wanting to do a composite with him… I also wanted to experiment with building my own fire with brushes because I wasn’t happy with most of the techniques I’ve found so far. The actions you can buy are just too ‘over the top’ and you have little control of what they do. I often want fire but no smoke. Sometimes I want gentle soft fire like candlelight, but sometimes I want explosion fire. Fire has so many different types of dimensions that I just wanted to be able to create it with brushes and then use various blending modes to build the flames into realistic looking fire.
I finally found a YouTube video with a technique that was very close to what I was looking for. I tried it and then modified it a bit and built my own small action to speed up some of the process steps.
Here is my first image using my custom fire. I’m sure it will get better as I use it more.
The key is in the first step in placing the flames with various shapes and levels of opacity, so as you build the blend mode layers, you keep the depth and character of flames and add all the beautiful colors of oranges and reds. After the flames are built, you can add the particles or sparks and also some hot spots.
I even built a second action for the explosion that adds the hot white to cream center for those really intense fires. I didn’t use that action in this composite but I tested it with some various explosion brushes.
The title of the composite is “The Gates of Hell”. The gate is actually a door in Bamberg Germany, the crest on top is from a door in Prague. The steer head and horns is a composite of a couple of images from my library. The ruins in the background are of the Greco-Roman theater from my trip to Taormina Italy in 2011 and all the foreground rocks are from Red Rock Canyon outside Las Vegas. (Yes… I travel a lot!) Everything else is created with digital brushes in Photoshop.
Hope you like it!
