I just used a round brush to create the stripes in the back. I downloaded the smoke brushes from brusheezy.com. I used the pen tool to draw the earbuds.

I don't see the difference.

The easiest part of this was touching up the blue glow around the hair with a brush tool.
The hardest part was all the confusing layers.

Shadow

I learned how to make an incredibly cheesy looking image. But in the process of doing so, I learned how to use a blur tool and the brush too.

Veggie Head