"Making Smoke & Flame Markers" Topic

I've just posted a tutorial on my Blog showing how I made the Smoke & Flame markers I recently used in a Flames of War game (mentioned in this TMP link yesterday).

link

It's a combination of ideas and techniques distilled from lots of other tutorials, hopefully simplified and streamlined into a simple method for producing good looking markers. I've been experimenting with different materials and techniques for a while now but once I'd settled on the 'best' way of making them I was able to make a dozen in just a couple of hours.

I hope you find the tutorial useful and please feel free to leave your feedback (good or bad) in the Blog comments.

BigLee
BLMA link

BigLee,

Excellent tutorial and you offer quite a number of useful ideas for material. I had not thought of using pipe cleaners as a "core" and clump foilage.

I don't game WWII, but I do find smoke screens, grass fires and the like useful with our scenarios.

Cheers,
Robert
18thcenturysojourn.blogspot.com

Acetone ……………………….. where were you last week?!@

Looks good to me, thank you for the post.

Looks good.

Nice idea on the clump foliage -- I wouldn't have expected it to look so good, but then I never thought of painting it. I wonder if over time you'll have a problem with it breaking off and revealing green spots? If so possibly try soaking them in thinned PVA glue (white glue). I had some clump foliage trees that stopped shedding once I did that.

Color-wise, it feels like there should be more yellow in there plus a little white or gray at the edges of the smoke, but that's easy to try out myself when I make my own. It might be hard to get that to look right.

Also … just curious … you've taken the classic miniatures painting approach to fire, which is to use a dark foundation (red) and highlight with lighter shades (yellow). In fact since actual fire emits rather than reflects light, it manifests the opposite color scheme, with the hotter fire at the core being white or yellow and at the edges, cooler fire being orange or red. Did you mess around with that paint scheme at all? I've seen good results with it but also sometimes, very odd-looking ones, since highlighting with darks is so counter-intuitive to miniatures painters.

I guess, answering my own question, that with flame markers for armored battles, you're really modeling up the column of smoke more than anything, and any color would be the glow from the internal fire showing through the smoke. That may very well appear red to the observer.

I'm currently making a second batch with the intention of reversing the colors, adding the black dusting after the red and yellow core colors. Also this second batch are thinner with more billowing tops. I saw this in some film footage of a Panzer brewing up that I saw on tv a few days ago.

You're right though, it should be smoke on the outside. Having said that I found that the whole thing looks very dark except under bright lighting so my flash lit pictures look a lot lighter than they do on the games table.

Thanks for everyones comments and feedback.

these look great big lee. I like that you used the pipe cleaner deals that way your not using up a ton of clump foliage.

Very awesome

Yup they look good. I have seen a similar idea with kitchen scrub sponge as the basic material.

Excellent tutorial. Thanks

Often wondered how this was done.

I first saw these in The Great War by GW picture but never got an answer. Another mind bending problem put to bed

Thanks for this
Andrew
Main site: blog.kings-sleep.me.uk
Sic Parvis Magna