the best way to achieve this?

[st.james]

I have been wondering if there is any good way of bending and twisting shapes, say if you wanted to make something like this sketch?

[slash-5]

It would take some work, but I would think of it as an Omega shape as far as the manipulation goes. Then, do the final overlap with warp/smudge/liquify/clone. Just how I'd think about it.

[Peter S]

Like this????

Made a selection of part of the jet streams, copied to a new layer then polar coordinates, copied this to new layer flipped horizontal. then warped to make them meet and masked out bits here and there.
Done very quickly, with more care result would have been better.

Peter

[slash-5]

Man, you rock.

[st.james]

thats really cool, Peter! just the tool I was looking for. Many thanks!