Storm front moving in

I am teaching a Photoshop workshop this weekend at my home, so today and tomorrow I thought I would post two of my favorite Photoshopped images. This is an abandoned house I found along a highway somewhere in Arizona (I think), and I created the tornado behind it. To make the funnel, I drew the shape with the lasso tool and filled it in with dark, stormy clouds. This is obviously a still photo, and I wanted the funnel to appear like it was rotating, which is exactly what they do. It took me two days to figure out how to do that. I took a photo of storm clouds and, using Edit > transform > scale (with ‘maintain proportions’ unchecked), I compressed the clouds until they appeared like horizontal streaks of light and dark. I then blended that image l into the funnel. The lightning is real, although it occurred in a different part of Arizona. I blended that into the picture using the ‘darken’ blend mode within the layers palette. Lightning sometimes accompanies tornadoes, so I thought that added realism to this composite.