Photoshop Project: My Insides All Turn to Ash, So Slow

"My insides all turn to ash, so slow"
- Linkin Park, from the song Valentine's Day, off of the album Minutes to Midnight

It's a song I like a lot, and I listened to it on Valentine's Day while playin around with Poser 7, which comes packaged with some skeleton models. I use them for everything, and thought, "I like these lyrics, let's see what I can do with them".

I listened to this song, and at first, I was going to do a piece in Corel Painter with my Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet, but I decided not to. I could do what I wanted to do even faster in Poser. I was at first going to make two shots: one of a female falling, and one of a female skeleton falling, then, in Photoshop, layer them, with the female on the top, apply a gradient layer mask, and make the skeleton layer's outermost side partially erased with an airbrush-type tool to erase parts of it with a layer mask (in case I mess up and want to erase it differently), but I ended up just wanting to do the female skeleton.

I posed it with a universal pose and rendered it, then I put it into Photoshop, and created a cavern of sorts. http://www.thedesignworld.com/photoshop-tutorials/texture/aurora-scene/ was the tutorial I used, by applying the aurora effect on 4 sides.

After I create the image, I'll use particle Illusion to add the smoke effect, with some falling ash.


UPDATE:

http://300pockets.deviantart.com/art/My-Insides-All-Turn-To-Ash-113711077

Finished image.

I chose not to do any smoke or particle effects for this picture.