Mystical Smoke Effect

I’m so excited! Today I got a request from someone asking if I could turn their image into a cartoon and add in a space background and some sort of cool light, smoke effect that makes it look like it’s coming from the guy’s hand. Here’s the final image:

 

 

The person who ordered this image wanted a colorful effect and absolutely loved this image! They said I was the best cartoonist on the Fiverr website they have seen! =) That really brought up my spirits and confidence in my work! But what else made me feel happy is that I finally pulled off a wonderful smoke effect without looking at a tutorial! I’ve see tutorial using the “Distort – Wave” filter but the settings they have don’t always work out the way I want.

For this effect, I had my settings on the following:

Number of Generators: 10

Wavelength: 71 Min and 216 Max

Amplitude: 5 Min and 178 Max

Scale: 55% Horz. and 86% Vert.

Type: Sine

Undefined Areas: Repeat Edge Pixels

To make the smoke effect, I used the wave filter about 4 times and after each, I went to “Edit – Fade Wave” and put it on 50%. I recommend playing with the wave settings to get the best effect.

Other tutorials say the same thing, they list the setting they have and they tell you to use fade wave (or at least some do). What I find to be the most helpful is that when you start to make your smoke effect, you have to draw the basic outline. This means don’t just go in a draw a square then hope the wave effect will magically turn the square into smoke!

I’ve read a tutorial where someone used the Polygon Lasso Tool to draw your smoke outline, which does work. You just have to draw a few points then connect them. But I find the Pen Tool to be the best because of the ability to make curved lines. I think the wave tool works best with curved lines rather then completely straight edges.

For my smoke effect, I drew some spirals around the gentlemen’s hand in the image and then used the setting above in the wave filter then used the fade wave. I did the wave filter and fade method about four times to the same outline. Then I drew in a white line (pressure sensitivity on when I went to stroke the line) and added the bending option “outer glow” of white then played with the size and blending options.

Finally, I used a clipping mask and used the rainbow gradient tool to make the overall rainbow look. I’m very happy with how this turned out. What do you think? I love colorful images like this and was very happy when I got this request! lol

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