Fire effects and wet blending techniques mix greatly. There is no easier way to achieve a nice fire, and learning web blending secrets during painting flames is a piece of cake. Check below how easy it is.

What do you need?

The list isn’t long this time:

• acrylic paints: red, orange and yellow (for Army Painter Dragon Red, Laba Orange and Phoenix Flames for example),
• *if you want to achieve ice fire effect or any other similar, just use two/three colors close to each other on the color range, e.x. for ice fire it will be Electric blue and Crystal Blue.
• one more paint – classic white,
• and the final, magic ingridient – acrylic retarder (medium from Vallejo is just right, but you can try others) which prevents paint from drying too fast. This one is optional, but helps a lot at the begining of your adventure with wet blending.

Time to start a fire!;-)

The fire effect has not to be perfectly done, cause shape of the fire is very irregular and dynamic. That’s why it’s a cool way to learn wet blending. To achieve your first fireball, follow the steps below.

Step 1
Paint with the white part of the mini where you want to achieve fire effect (it ensures colors you gonna use later will be vivid and radiant). Waiting for it for dry you can prepare paints (white, yellow, orange, and red) by adding one drop of retardant each. If you are fast/experienced you can skip retarder, but it really helps if used sparingly.

Step 2
Paint again with white (but know it has retarder) this fragment of miniature’s part you want to have the brightest.

Step 3
Take yellow and paint the rest of the mini’s part starting from place little above where new white (with retarder) ends. See how white nicely mixes with yellow here? Now you want to have elements which look like that:

Step 4
Repeat with orange but leave a little area of yellow untouched, then you should have a small area where yellow mixed with orange and finally are with pure orange:

Step 5
Finally add a little bit of red, leaving some space with where orange doesn’t mix with any other color:

Common problems

• If you are using retarder you have A LOT of time between each step, without retarder you have to be fast.
• It’s very easy to add too much retarder to the paint, especially if you painting little element and you are using just a drop of paint. Test your retarder earlier to know how strong it is.
• Remember when you use retarder for every tone it’s event easier to use it too much and then you have to wait really long before every step.
• If you have done sth wrong, and you are not satisfied, then add more layers of chosen tones, it will not affect the final effect and fire can still look great.