Explosion Sauce and the Cyclops

How I did it:

Background Image:
-Duplicate Layer
-Use layer mask to cut out sky
-Hue/Saturation layer to make the grass all pinky

Cyclops-
-Google image search to find a monster at a good angle
-Pasted the picture in and used layer mask to cut out background
-Magnetic Lasso/ selection mask to cut out hand
-Copy hand into a new layer to give illusion that he's holding the bottle

Fire-
-Found a pic of a fire spitter on google image search (search for dragons yeilded few results)
-Rotated pic and used color selection to delete the black out of the pic.
-Layer mask to get rid of the man
-Layer opacity- 72%

Sunburst lines
-Opened new layer about 5x20 pix. Fill half with black
-Edit> define pattern
-Opened new layer much bigger than original graphic. 1000x1000 pix
-Edit>Fill. Filled canvas with the pattern I just made
-Canvas is filled with vertical black lines. Resized lines till they looked thick enough
-Polar filter- Rectangular to polar
-Canvas is now filled with black sunburst lines
-Select all and copy into main image
-Moved the layer all the way to the back and used saturation to make them a good color (could also have changed blend mode
-Created layer mask
-To Create fade effect:: Used huge soft black brush to in the center of the starburst (in the layer mask, not the image), so that center of starburst was deleted and faded in. With the layer mask still selected, I inverted it by pressing ctrl+I. Starburst now fades out at the edges

Sky
-Created another hue saturation level just above the background layer
-Created layer mask and used a 50% opacity black brush to give the cyclops a nice glow.

Sauce
- Nothing fancy, just found a tabasco bottle online, deleted the background and pasted it in. To change the label, I didn't even use clone tool; I just used eyedropper to get the color of the label, painted over the word 'tabasco', and put in the word 'explosion'. I just angled the text too; I didnt try to warp it or anything to make it look more realistic

Text
-This was fun, actually. I found a good font, and beveled, drop shadowed, and inner glowed the shit out of it. (the inner glow is on 100% noise, for that gritty feel) Then I liquified it (had to rasterize the text), and just played around with the letters, blowing some up and pinching others. I was pretty happy with the result. Then I changed the blending mode to "overlay"

Check the band out at myspace.com/explosionsauce

If anyone has any questions or doesn't understand one of my steps, let me know and I'll elaborate. And, as always, I will photoshop your pics for 5 bucks on paypal. Natural or wacky,
restoration, coloration, whatever. But I'm putting it up on the site when I'm done.