How to Draw Flames

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Jay French, in jayfrenchstudios dot com. Today, I'm going to show you how to draw a fire. Okay. In drawing flames, now of course, it all depends on the style you're using. If you're going with photo realism, which we're not going to do today because we don't have that kind of time. I'm going to draw a little campfire here. We're going to do, we're going to say we're doing fairly realistic. But, sketchy, nonetheless. I'm going to have a little campfire going on here. Here are the rocks. Okay. Our fire is coming off of this. Now, fire is very complicated to draw, and if you're working in color, and you're not working in ink lines, I would say, definitely do not have any dark lines around the edges of the flames. They'll look much more realistic that way. But, we want to show you this if you were working with just in pencil or if you're going to ink. Fire, generally is conal. It's going to be tallest towards the middle. Now, that is not consistent. But, generally it is that shape. It is highest in the center of whatever it is that's on fire. Now, you have something long that's on fire, it can take different elem, a manner of different shapes. So, generally if it's one concentrated fire, you got that general thing going on. Now, you can have, the best way to consider that, with its variations, is to maybe make a tallest area just off center. Now, flames are random, but they usually have a point to them that make them look more recognizable in art. This is one of those areas where art can really variate. And has to standby different standards than, than reality, because you have to draw a fire, so that's recognizable as fire. Often times, if you draw it straight from life, people won't even know what it is. So, yeah, you want the general. You can have occasional flareups here, and even sometimes, you can come in thinner like this. And you want tendrils that are sticking out beyond, which can even be forked, and smaller ones as they go higher, and some of them could be really large ones, that are separated. Let's get rid of these lines. Now, let's show you what you can do with it in color, because you can get a lot there. One of the main points in fire, to make it look more realistic, is that it is lightest on the outside. Of course. We often represent fire as red, but really it is mostly yellow. So, you want it lightest on the ends. Because, actually, what you're looking at, when you see fire you can see it best against a dark background. If you're actually, we're doing this whole image, and you had whatever what's behind here, it will probably be a lot darker, the ends would almost be white. Now, you can get darker as you go in. Keep your, keep going to the shape, keep up with the dark, with the points as you darken. Maybe in some of the centers of these, bigger areas that are sticking out. And, then, we can get more torch spread. You will, try not to drop the pencil. Get your orange in here. If you have a blending stick, or if you blend it with a white pencil, this really the time you want to do it, because you want this as soft of and edge as you can get, on that fade from yellow to orange, from color to color. Make this darker, so it gets deeper into the heat, until eventually you have just a bit. Actually, let's add some, just a hint, so we get bigger, separated areas. That's about enough. And then, you'll actually have, and then you still seeing kind of the points. The darkest at the bottom. And that gives you some ideas of how to draw a fire."