Creating an Explosion with photoshop

In my digital design class we were asked to create a surreal image using one of our photos. I really don't like surrealism. I finally, at the last second, decided to make a picture of my sister's friend shooting a car with her hands and having the car explode, (Or at least try to do so).

This is the Original

I started off by cutting out an actual explosion from another picture. (Yes. I know. It seems like I'm cheating but I had to do a lot more to make it realistic.)

I then Blended the sides of the cut out explosion using the blur tool so that it didn't have that nasty cut-out look. I drew gray particles then copy and pasted them all around the explosion. i also gave the whole image a posterizing filter effect. (It made the main image and explosion fit together better.)

I added fog around the explosion. Gave the particles a motion blur shooting away from the car.

Finished photo. I cut out some of the bottom of the car's particles. I fixed the lighting and shadows using the burn tool so that I could make it darker on the back of the girl. Also gave the image a bleach bypass effect.

It's For Digital Design Class

This blog is mainly for my Digital Design class. We are asked to create a blog on the web and publish our drawings and photoshopped photos onto it. Our teacher's name is Mrs. Lelek. We work in a class room with iMacs, (which I'm still getting used to). On the first day of class Mrs. Lelek spent 10 minutes searching for the 'x' button on a safari page... Figures we'd get a teacher who doesn't know what the fuck she's doing.

I have to show this to the class so I'll probably have to edit some things out.

Here are some Photos i've done so far.

Photo taken in Chicago with me and my friend Michael.

My sister was taking care of puppies for the week so I

decided to take pictures of them. It was hard because

they moved a lot.

Ill post some more later..