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I used a combination of layer masks, smart blur, color range and gradients that I learned from Corey Barker's tutorial, Photo to Drawing, to create my own original piece. I experimented with a few layers of color and gradients as well as with the aid of the pen tool, to create the design shapes in the picture.

The tutorial on alpha channels made my day when I watched it and I decided to re-take that learned skill and apply it to my own creative twist. In this image I took the fiery inspiration from the glowing gel fire thingy. I used the alpha channel extraction technique to get all these smoke elements then with my background set it was just a matter of taking my theme: Fire elemental and making my model absorb all that fiery energy. I started blending her into the background by using a layer mask and the diverse smoke elements I extracted previously. then I used those same smoke elements to overlay the background and make a more realistic fire effect. Once the fire was nicely laid out I went on to retouching. With the retouching complete I added some extra lights and shadows which I learned how to apply after watching the "dancing with the stars" tutorial. And to wrap things up I had to have a powerful accent text. I went on and found that the simplest fire symbol is a circle and that was great since it would contrast the piece perfectly. And to ad the last touch of salt I added that final lens flare effect on the top left again by extracting the light information from a lens flare how you taught on a previous tutorial. And there you go Alpha channel's rock! They make masking so much fun and not only that you can save all your extractions as custom brushes so you can re-use them over and over again. Thanks for such great tutorials Corey.

When thinking of how to best combine the techniques of drawing to photo, smoke mask, and design swirls, I thought it would be interesting to have an image of a fighter that was blasting his way out of the design with some crazy comic book kung fu type of technique. The idea evolved into a tiger themed fighter with the ability to throw a punch that turned his fist into a fiery tiger. Who wouldn't want to be able to do that?

So using a stock image of a fireball and a tiger I was able to use the "Design with Alpha Channel" technique to create a glowing tiger shape at the end of teh fighter's arm. I used the "Photo to Drawing" technique to blend the image of the fighter into the canvas. I also included line drawings of a tiger head and lots of hand drawn tiger stripes to give a more complete theme to the design. The "Masking with Shapes" technique yielded the swirls seen along the parchment edges. I wasn't a fan of these at first, but I think they work well as a compliment to the tiger stripes.