Hello and welcome to my very first tutorial, the point with this tutorials is that you will be able to create equally good explosive images like those that i have made. I wrote this tutorial because their was many people who wanted to know, how i made the explosions on my pictures. Well.. here is it, enjoy.

Firstly you must download the explosive images at Artbeats.com, personally i have all the still images from all the catalogues that were available at Artbeats, but take the images you find realistic enough that suites your images. Secondly you must prepare your scene for the explosion, add particles in motion, add some flares, increse the intensity of the exploding lights...

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Ok. now its time to load up your paint program with a decent layer some glow around the edges on red/orange colour on a NEW (screen) layer, never paint onto the surface of the original image, everything will be drawn in layers. Start drawing around the area where the explosions occur, do this acouple of times with using a lower opacity on the brush. After that open a new (Color Dodge) layer, select a small brush and increase the explosion intensity by painting with a low brush over the places you painted on the first layer. This should give some depth to the "ex.clouds" you made.

image, i have chosen PhotoShop for this job but any other system would also be fine. The first step you will do is to add the particles, explosion area. This can be done by using a

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(This step is optional) Now its time to place the debris elements upon the picture, as you know during a explosion there just goto be some small bits flying everywhere. So this is how you do, load up one of the debris images you downloaded from Artbeats and place it on where you find the explosions is as its strongest or were the hull on the ship is at its weakest. Screen layer it, resize it, rotate it until it fits to your expectations.

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Now lets place the explotion pictures upon the your image, view throe the images you took from Artbeats, which one is most suitable for the pic, then load it up and paste it, turn it into a screen layer to get rid of the black edges and then resize it, rotate it until that one is ready, then start from the beginning load up a new exp. image and do that again and again until you find it satisfied. When the image is ready and everything is done, save it. I recommend that you use a little bit Motion blur on the final image for more realism.

Click here to view the final image, i hope that this gave you some insight of how i make those good looking explosions. Now run off.. and make some good looking boom images, and if you still got problems or having small difficulties- email me.