Introduction: I receive some mails to do this make up, the idea of this work is the concept of Energy, this is originally for a graphic design site, I am a designer, but I like a lot digital painting. I have this idea in my mind, to translate the fire energy to an image, and this came out, I didn’t do any sketch, for that I consider this a speed painting; (it took less than 2 hours to do).

Tools: I used photoshop 7 and a wacom graphire 4 tablet, (the small one), my hardware specs are AMD Athlon 1800 512mb ram, and 17in. monitor

Preparation: With the concept and idea in my mind I did small canvas size at 1264 x 550 pixels, since the image is for the web.

Beginning

The first I do is to put a background color, the base color.

Then I chose my color palette and try to put only warm colors, with nice contrast.

I choose Dodge, sharpen and brush as my tools. I have some great brushes from Natascha Roeoesli (http://tascha.ch) and I used three of it in this image, but my base brush is the round brush, one with opacity controlled by pen and the another is 100% in opacity.

with some orange color and the dodge tool I put my light source

With my round brush I put the dark shapes and the main idea.

I start to put more light bounces, defining the shapes and the sketch of the main character. I use some low opacity brush for the far trees.

More defining and I use some tashas brushes for leaves and little trees.

I add some more leaves with tashas brushes and putting more detail on it.

I use the smudge tool for the fire to make it more fluid.

Some great things happen when you use the sharpen tool, brings more details to things like logs and leaves, and some of the character details.

I draw the little dots with a single touch with the round brush (the backdrop is only for easy seeing).

Then I duplicate the layer and make some Gaussian blur in the down layer to add the bright effect.

The paint is now with the dots and I put some noise (like 3 %) to make it more warm and atmospheric feeling.

With the final image I play with the hue and saturation, bright and contrast. I used the sharpen tool to do some more final details.

Hope you have enjoyed this making and if required any info then feel free to contact me in artecnl@gmail.com and in msn artecnl@hotmail.com . Thanks for seeing.