Let's Try GIMP! Lesson 10: Making Smoke without Fire

I've done a lot with altering existing images, but I haven't really created any from scratch. That's largely because I am hamfisted and couldn't foreshorten if my life depended on it, but rest assured: there's one thing that even people as artistically-deficient as myself can make.

That thing is smoke. Pretty, wispy, see-through smoke.

Really!

We begin with a transparent layer. Using the Paintbrush tool, select the largest round brush (19) and a nice medium-grey.

Next, draw a straight-ish line. Luck for me, it needn't be perfect.

Give it a sibling in a slightly darker shade of grey.

The Gaussian Blur function lives in the Filters menu.

By toggling the degree of blur to 35.o, we ensure that it turns really, really fuzzy. (I've added a separate white layer to the background for easy visibility; it has no bearing on the tutorial.)

Fuzzy, but not really smokey.

The IWarp filter will let us stretch the image.

The Swirl CCW option twists the image counter-clockwise around the point at which you click. Above, it's been applied three times.

Next, the Move option lets us grab and shift the pixels as though they were printed on a stretchy sheet. Click with the left mouse button, hold it down, and drag upward and outward. Try it a few times, and we get a nice twisted columnar shape.

Ta-daa!

Here it is on a black backdrop.

On the blue, the color variations that result from the two shades of grey are most visible. (You could do it with only one, but it would be less detailed.)