Drawing Smokes

Drawing smokes was undoubtedly the biggest challenge for me because I never tried anything as dynamic as this (oh that's before I start drawing water and clothes in the future).

In my mockups, the smokes were drawn with the same workflow as I always use, which is outlining, colour filling & shading.

This kind of smoke looks quite good in stills, but soon you'll discover that with this workflow, it could take more than a week to draw a 25-frame sequence of expanding/contracting smokes. Thus a more efficient workflow must be developed.

After many trial-and-errors, I found this technique pretty flexible and the result is quite pleasing. The concept is to draw the smoke using only a single stroke of brush, with the following settings:
Spacing: 34%
Size Jitter: 43%
Scatter: 36%
and then apply a stroke and a hard inner shadow to the layer, and there we go, a stroke of smoke!

These are some of the demonstrations of this technique. This is a 7-frame sequence of an expanding smoke.

This is a 5-frame sequence of another expanding smoke.

And this is a 9-frame smoke transition.