Thunderchild (5a): improving the smoke and fire

Hi there! I just did a little touch-up of all the fiery bits of the lost tripod. I wanted to darken the top of the smoke cloud, because it would look more realistic. I took my Indian ink for that purpose, took a brush and tapped the ink from the brush into the fiberfill cloud. It needed quite a  lot of tapped brushes but in the end the result was that the top part of the cloud became much darker and "sooty".  With some burnt sienna ecoline I did some accentuating in the yellow part of the cloud for some more nuance. With some titan white acrylic I touched up the flames a little. Now it starts to look like a genuine fire. Perhaps some more tinkering will follow, who knows...

here in a close-up view, you can see that the yellow-orangey colour of the fiberfill has been
spattered with the black indian ink. The flakeyness of the spatter also gives it more body,
like there are little burning fragments in the cloud. It really needs time to dry, the fiberfill is like
ultra thin plastic fibre, and it doesn't really absorb the colours. So the ink dries in little clumps
on the fibres. The 'soaking' of the stuff in ecoline however, did give it a more equally spread colour.