The below picture is of just the larger Fire Elemental after I've added a couple layers of a pale yellow (4 skull white + 2 sunburst yellow + 1 gunk #1). Unfortunately, this whole "thinned down paints" thing is really tricky and I found it hard to keep the paint where I wanted. Since it ended up being too yellow, right after taking this picture, I went and did a couple thinned down skull white washes to restore some of the white heat.
At this point, I also had to develop a clearer idea of how I wanted to handle this whole fire business. There are a couple ways to go about painting fire elementals. First, one needs to decide whether they want to do the "white where it's hottest, red where coolest" style or the reverse. The former is probably factually correct, but it still looks a bit weird to me. Nevertheless, I decided to do white = hot.
Secondly, one needs to figure out where are things the hottest? Searching online, I found people took a couple different approaches:
1. The torso is hottest, cooling as you radiate away from the chest. To me that creates a weird bullseye sort of look that doesn't sit right.
2. Uniformly hot. The elemental has the same basic color throughout. There is some color variation but only on each particular lick of flame. These elementals are usually painted in oranges and reds, with some yellow at the bases of the flames but no white hot points.
3. Hottest where touching the ground. Visually, this is the most intuitive - we're used to seeing fire hottest where the fuel is. The feet will be white hot but the elemental cools and becomes yellow-orange-red as you move up.
I'm leaning towards a mix of #2 & #3. I want the areas closest to the ground to be hot but I also want each individual flame to show gradiation.
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