How to create a fire spark?

[Newletsorboby]

I'm trying to achieve something like the top half of the photo, but several of my end results look awful all around and overly blurry even when I reduce the blur. They also don't look anywhere near as sharp or bright as other examples I've seen online. I'm just trying to create a single spark for now, then I'll duplicate it, etc, later. 

My last few attempts have been to create a rectangle/thick line with a bright orange fill and 3-4 px stroke, and then go to effects > Gaussian Blur with default 10px radius. Then I create another similar rectangle with a darker orange and do the same blur, but make it less blurry. Then I use Warp > Arc and give it a very small bend so it appears more rounded. But with several attempts, different settings, colours, stroke, etc, they all come out pretty bad and I can't find any examples/tips online on how to approach this.

[barbara_a]

You could try something like this:

[Newletsorboby]

Thanks for the reply. I'm going to try this and see where I get. 

[Newletsorboby]

I've managed to do all those and adjust some settings, but do you know where I could find the "Outer Glow"? 

I've tried effects > stylize and can't find it in the list of 20 or so effects. I also tried window > appearance and it doesn't appear on that tab. I also tried setting my document color mode > rgb and that didn't make it show up either. All I can find is "Glowing Edges" which turns the object into cyan/dark green pixels. 

[barbara_a]

It's under Effects > Stylize. The 4th stylize effect in the list.

[Newletsorboby]

Apologies if I'm missing something:

This is on Illustrator version v29.0 and for some reason I can't see/find it. I also went to the official Adobe page tutorial on how to add glow, but none of the options there either were displaying for me. 

[Newletsorboby]

I just realised I was checking Photoshop options and not Illustrator, that was my bad