[Extended Practice]Drawing explosion and smoke

I have never animated smoke or any special effects before... so this scene is very difficult! I started with rough sketching of the smoke. Considering the force of the explosion and wind and all those kind of stuffs are not easy at all. It did not look natural and almost too gentle to be an explosion.

It might sounds silly but I took a lot of reference from the battle scenes of One Piece and other manga. I read manga a lot and I immediately thought about the fight scenes in One Piece when trying fixing the smoke. There are a lot special effect drawing in every episode so I learnt how to draw smoke and using a lot of lines to show the flow of air and the sense of speed as well. Oda Eiichiro, the author of One Piece uses shading and leaving blank space to show different stage of an explosion.

It turns out totally different from the first attempt and it gains so much more volume and powerful. I am glad that the style of manga matches my animation and super pleased with this new technique! I focused a lot on the shading of the 'little clouds' diverged from the smoke and every clouds should flow to different direction due to the power of the wind which should also be random to be realistic.

After this scene....it comes the most challenging scene in the whole animation which is the spread out of the smoke. It is so difficult because the smoke is moving while changing shapes. I messed up so many time that was unable to do both motion at the same time. Therefore looked for reference online. Could not find something more useful than this following picture. Although it is a diagram of how to animate fire, it shows clearly how air flows hence how the special effect should look like. I adopted this tutorial and spent so much time on this scene, hoping to master the smoke...

Eventually, it took two  days to finish this scene and I know they are not the most perfect smoke in the world but I am still quite happy with the result. I like the volume of the 'calm' smoke and the reduce in size where it moves away from the bomb. However, it is quite stiff and did not look like gas but solid instead. It might due to the strong black line I used and too much continuous lines. It might be better if I give the brush more shatter in the customise section so that the line could be less intense.