It's a long shot.  

This was a fun project to work on!  Technically we were supposed to work through one of the examples in the book and just edit it in some way to make it original.  I had this idea in my head and figured I'd go for it, since it uses most, if not all of the tricks in the whiskey workup.

I did a ton to this... many many layers, masking, smoke brushes (from a work project I had), free images from the web, soft light... and more.

I had to cut the main picture of the sniper (Novritsch, a YouTube airsoft sniper. If you're into that, he's got some sick videos, look him up) out mostly with the quick select, but he was on a forest background, so I had to do a lot by hand too... since the simple white background/mess with the channels really only works if you have a mostly solid background.  (I've literally done over 200 of those kinds of cutouts for work for a huge collage of headshots we did last year).

From there I found the background picture, which is a rubbled city... some free image somewhere...

From there just added bits and pieces/adjusted the opacity to make it all fall into place...  added a fire on the left with smoke and lit up the smoke like there was actually a fire... added sparks... and more sparks... 

Then little things like adjusting the sniper with some soft light so there was a shadow cast over him... added his logo in two places (one super large one very soft in the background and one on his pack) just for fun and good measure/photo rights. lengthening his sleeve cause I didn't like how his bare wrist was showing...

and of course, adding the text. Which obviously I edited the kerning to make the last two words the same length.

All in all, I think it turned out pretty good!  I had fun doing it, and I learned some cool stuff too!