Fire breathing dragon or burping dragon?

You know how you get one of those songs in your head and only "It's a Small World" can chase it away but that leaves you with, well, Small World instead?  Well, once I did some trials of the swirly fire for the fire breathing dragon and thought "It looks like they're burping",  I was in the same state.  I just can't see it any other way.  

These 2 dragons have mouths aiming down so I paired them in the photo.  My primary goal for this set of pictures was to try out color combos with the swirly fire silkscreen.  I am not happy with the silkscreen but do like the color combinations with the different colors of the dragons.  I still have to paint the red dragons and will be trying out some shooting flames with the swirly on the fabric one.

Fire going down, paper on left, fabric on right

 These 2 dragons are flaming more upward or just out.  The red one on fabric has a bit more space between the mouth and the fireball so I have hopes that it will look different from the two paper ones.

paper on left, fabric on right, fire going level

 And I have a third paper one that I will working with first, trying out different flame styles.  That's really one of my meta lessons for this series.  I have to experiment one piece at a time, changing one thing at a time to get the best return on my effort.  Each piece has something to tell me and I may need to totally change direction after it so I need to focus on one at a time and learn from it.  I keep trying to jump ahead and be efficient and I know in my head that doesn't work but getting it integrated into my process is a different matter.