After painting the green translucent Bones, I also wanted to try the red miniatures from the “Fire It Up!” set. The Medium Fire Elemental (77083) is a nice model, but you really cannot see any details in the translucent miniature without painting it.

Some people modified the fire elemental miniatures with LEDs to produce some extra glow (examples see here, here and here). I like some of the results (check out the large fire elemental from Reaper board member onyxGuenhwyvar!) , but I wanted small bases and no tinkering around with LEDs. So, meh – no LEDs for me. I decided on just doing some highlighting.

Basing and Priming

The figure is medium size, so I used a 25mm base for it and put some bird sand on it. I primed the sand with black and the miniature with Vallejo Satin Varnish to be able to paint on the plastic surface.

Painting

I wasn’t really sure how to approach the fact, that fire usually is brighter/hotter on the inside and colder/darker at the outside. There are good tutorials on how to paint that (e.g. the excellent tutorial from Laszlo Jakusovszky on hot-lead.org), so first, I mixed a wash of yellow and used it on the whole mini. Normally, a dark wash would be used this way to add shadows. The next steps were just basic drybrushing with Vallejo Game Color (GC) “Fire Orange”, Vallejo Model Color (MC) “Yellow” and “Off-White”. I tried to add some black smoke at the tips of the “hair”, but didn’t like it and painted over it. So overall, it was very easy and basic to paint this miniature this way. And it still looks nice enough for the gaming table.

Finishing Touches

The figure was sealed with Army Painter Anti-Shine Varnish. After that, I added grass and tufts to the base and painted little dots of GC “Fire Orange” on the blades of grass to simulate embers.