Liquid Heat

This is today's piece.
I've been looking to make something fiery, and found a tutorial that gave me an
idea... funny thing is, this looks nothing like what the tutorial was going to make. I basically took the advice of playing with filter>liquify and smudge tool. Even the way it is colored was done differently... he used a hue adjustment layer, but i used a solid orange layer with blending set to color. I also added a few light red and yellow highlights on a top layer.

It was originally going to be a customizable fire effect, but this looks nothing like a flame, by shape. It was basically a vertical gray rectangle with filter> sketch> fibers. Then a big 90 degree motion blur, and the whole thing turned sideways. It was stretched to the sides of the screen and warped, and then liquify and smudge were used until desired results were achieved. Last the colors were played with. I added an inner and an outer glow, and used red and yellow brushes on a separate layer on overlay.

So... technique of the day? Liquify it!