Smoke from a crashed airplane

Using cotton balls is the ONLY method I've seen. You might try to reshape the cotton balls in such a way that they don't still resemble cotton balls when painted. Unfortunately, when working with models and other miniatures we have to use a little of our imaginations to make up for the limitations inherent with trying to produce realism in miniature.

I wonder if there is a way to stain the cotton balls beforehand so that there aren't any bright white fibers showing. If you could could stain all the fibers grey and add painted highlights of other colours that might help.

Someone did a dio similar to what you're looking to achieve. Can't remember who it was.

I'm thinking the Skyhawk dropping bombs in Vietnam.

But it's a little hard to visualize the diorama here. A victor doesn't fly over a crash since about 1914.

If so due to a low level dog fight in WW2, the victor might well fly through scattered parts but due to the speed of the aircraft there'd be no smoke or fire yet.

A few times I have done something with smoke or fire, I used fiberglass insulation painted appropriately. Not as thick as cotton and is in strands.

cs.finescale.com/.../155819.aspx

I think this is the post you guys are talking about but it seems like he has taking the pics down for some reason

Thats the one. Too bad the pictures are gone. I think maybe there was even a light bulb in the tuft of smoke.

EDIT: right, he said that.

Further down is a picture of the real thing. Actually his dio looked pretty much just like that.

Ever thought about real smoke? They make some pretty cool smoke generators for R/C tanks that might be very interesting.