How to Use Adobe Photoshop to Make Fire

One of the things that people look for in a graphic artist is the ability to create the "basics" of nature, meaning things like sky, water, and fire. Fortunately, none of these are really all that hard to produce. This tutorial will show you how to make fire entirely inside Photoshop. The steps require a little practice, but once you get the feel for it, making fire will be easy.

Instructions

1. 

   Open a new document. You can make it whatever size you like, but you will have to adjust your subsequent brush sizes accordingly.

2. 

   Go to the Tools panel and fill the canvas with black. Then go to the Layers panel and create a new layer.

3. 

   Go to the bottom of the Tools panel and change the foreground color to a shade of red. Then change the background color to a shade of yellow.

4. 

   Select the Paint tool and set the brush to about 15, depending on the initial size of your image. Begin painting in little blotches of paint, switching back and forth between the two colors. You are not trying to create flames yet. Place the color where the base of your flames would be. You might want to vary the colors slightly as you work, perhaps adding an orange or a brighter yellow.

5. 

   Go to the Smudge tool. The size of the brush will determine the width of your flames, and the strength will determine their height. Start with a size 10 or so, and 50 percent strength, and adjust these as you work. With a wavy motion, begin brushing upward from the base. You may find that you have to go back to the Paintbrush and add more color. If so, use the Smudge tool on these new paint blotches as well. When finished, you should have something resembling flames in the image.

Tips & Warnings

• The key to this technique is layering the paint.