I can truly say that watching a webinar with Julianne Kost called 'Creating Personal Projects that Reignite the Creative Spark', did exactly what it said on the box - it reignited my creative spark. Julieanne showed some images she had created in Photoshop using pictures of smoke, and I immediately had to give it a go. In fact, before she had finished her questions and answers session at the end of the webinar, I had created my first smoke flake. I was instantly hooked, and below you can see some of my many attempts.
If you would like to see how I created the smoke flakes, I have made step-by-step instructions here.
One single image of smoke can produce an almost infinite number of variations, as the picture below shows - all the images in the grid were produced from the same puff of smoke.