Bushido is full of beautiful miniatures and none more so for me than Hotaru - the wave 6 addition to the Temple of Ro Kan faction. I managed to get my hands on her early at Jwardiff 2012 (thank you GCT!) and I haven't tried painting fire before! However she deserves a good job so here is my documenting painting her fire in case it turns out well and can be of help to others!
I found a guide to painting fire on line that I have tried to adapt and follow so full respect and acknowledgement to Laszlo Jakusovszky at these pages: http://hot-lead.org/advance/fire.htm. I recommend a thorough read of this! So here is Hotaru assembled:
Step 1: I undercoated the model using a standard Black and then gave the fire trail two thin coats of Gw foundation white to give it a nice bright base.
Step 2: A thinned wash 3:1 of Vallejo GC7 (gold yellow)
Step 3: A wash of Orange fire
Step 4: A wash of hot orange focusing on the bottom two thirds of the fire arch.
Step 5 - Some red gore at the bottom. I figured the top by her foot was the hottest area so the colour gets redder the lower the flame trail as it is cooler. This is the washing complete now and with the Hot Iron guide I am at Step 9. Ready to highlight!
This shot is from the back of the model to show the colour gradient better.
Step 6 - I slowly start with Gold Yellow and bring it up to skull white on the top third of the flame. I forgot to take a picture but I applied a third glaze of yellow after doing this and then one final touch of skull white on the high parts.
Step 7 - First apologies for the pic quality! I layer Golden Yellow in the middle third and Golden Yellow + Hot Orange and a little pure Hot Orange in the bottom third. I also use skull white on small highlights in the middle third
Step 8 - A final thin glaze of Orange, retouch upper whites and.....
Finished!
There may be quicker ways through this but these are the steps I followed. If you have a go let me know how you got on!
