Painting over procedural smoke (Patreon)

Here's some smoke from the shot I'm working on, as well as the rough animation I used as a guide!
It needed to be painterly to match some other things going on in the scene, so I thought rather than doing hand drawn rough animation just to paint over it, I'd try something else.

I've always liked this style of procedurally generated "bubbly smoke" in old computer graphics, so I emulated the effect. Probably an odd meld of styles since most people who want to do painterly by-hand stuff seem to feel very differently about unashamedly digital effects. I think it was the right choice here though- while I also like animating redrawn smoke and the way that it moves, the thing you're really animating in those cases is the silhouette. This technique allowed for complex movement of light-and-dark values within the shape, which gets more mileage out of painty animation than starting out working in flat colours would have.

(The spheres won't be just appearing like that by the way, they're coming out from behind something).