Emotional Flame On!!

Flame Art: Overwhelmed

Flame Art: Despair

Flame Art: Excitement

The second part of this week's blog involved using Flame Painter 4, a unique program that uses life-like particle brushes to enhance your art. Just like any other digital art program, this program has many brushes to choose from, and allows you to use layers. It is like a Krita or Photoshop, but only with crazy brushes! I had a lot of fun with this program, however, I am cheap and will probably not end up ever buying the full version, despite how cool it looks!


After playing around with the brushes and the different settings, I began creating random stuff. I wasn't sure which emotions I wanted to display, so I started with just creating stuff and seeing how it made me feel. It was hard to do by solely using an abstract form, so after the first two I decided to add a semi-concrete element to the art. 

For overwhelmed, I modeled the person off of Edvard Much's The Scream. Then adding a lot of colorful busy backgrounds, I created a sense of the scene overwhelming the person. The person clutching their head adds to this, as this is a stereotypical action we see people do when they are overwhelmed. Without the person added to this piece, I think it could be interpreted as just a happy piece, which isn't what I was going for. 

Despair was the first one I had created. I tried creating an actual flame, but it was a lot harder than I was expecting. I was going to go with a blue tone theme for it, since we correlate blue with sadness. However, after playing around with the filters, I ended up with this and I thought it looked really cool. The black in the background feels like shadows that are about to consume the light in the center, creating a sense of despair. 

Then lastly I couldn't decide which two I liked the most, so I picked my top 3. Excitement was the last one on this lit. I used a simple stick figure to show someone running or dancing, then added bright colors around them. I tried to make it look as though they were almost playing with ribbons in the air, going from hand to hand. However, some of the brushes are tricky to use, so it ended up a little awkward. Then at the bottom I used this aloe brush the program had. It helped create a sense that the stick figure was frolicking through the grass.