creating effects in photoshop

Smoke effect:

I wanted to create a smoke effect as i thought it would look interesting to see a figure either coming through smoke or fading into smoke. I started doing this by drawing grey in random directions over the page. I then had my layout for the smoke background. I began to use an effect could radical blur which gave me the faded smoke look i wanted. I then used another effect called wave to smudge it in different directions. 

After that i added some colour to the smoke. I wanted to add colour as i thought that it would add a nice effect to the smoke and make the image stand out more and draw attention the what is it surrounding, in this case it is Nic.

I then blurred the two layers together and and got a dark grey smoke with a clashing red smoke. I trailed the effect with my chosen final image of Nic on a black background. After this i was able to start messing around with the image to see if i could make it look as if he was coming out/fading into the smoke.

I looked into the distort effect and selected just Nics face. It worked well to an extent but i thought it would look better if the rest of him blended in as well. I did a blur effect on his body but again it didn't look right with all the effects so instead i did a distort effect on all of Nic but made his face more blurred than the rest of him to achieve my desired theme.