Shiva, keep on burning

I did another 5 hour session in the studio with focus on working more with the airbrush on the background flames on the Shiva piece.

Here are the tools I'm using. Compressor and Iwata Eclipse HPC airbrush. Creatix and Golden fluid acrylics with airbrush medium/extender. Home made shields cut out of watercolor paper.

The first thing I did was to use golden acrylic and smaller shield shapes to put down a variety of orange flame shapes. I really like how the airbrush can be used to create hard and soft lines.

I gently glazed over from bottom to top res-orange-yellow to create a gradual change in color. I think the flames are looking more violent now with more harder crisp edges.

Here is a shot of the entire piece so you can better see the darker red bottom and how it moves up into the yellow at the top. I think it is starting to look like a bushy ball of fire.

I then created yellow flames over the entire piece. I was hoping the yellow would be less opaque an I wasn't happy with how "canary" yellow the tone came out but I do like the gentle fades over the orange and red.

I used the airbrush and watered down reds and oranges to tone back the yellow and bring back the gradient I ant the whole piece to have from top to bottom. I am still not entirely happy with the flames yet, but I need to put in some more lights and then go over it with freehand to smooth out some areas. But first, I need to get to the art supply store for some more black Gesso and to get a different color yellow for the remaining flame layers.