Started with a staged picture of myself. Blurred room and blocked face.

Cut myself into a seperate document and rotated the lower half of my leg to give the illusion of a flying kick. Touched-up with clone and also erased some parts of my pants and shirt to make it all fit tighter over my body shape.

Cut out the ninja mask from the mentioned source. Used hue/saturation and curves to turn it a realistic black.

Pasted the mask over my head.

Cut out the karate robe from the provided source link and used the same method in step 3 to turn it black. Did alot of work with the warp and clone stamp to make some changes and to fit over my body: warped arms to fit; clone stamp to add in part of the left sleeve; rotated the foot of the leg that was raised in step 2; desaturated legs and adjusted with curves; selected and warped the belt strings to appear loose in motion, then covered up exposed areas on the robe with the clone stamping and more warping.

Finally, flipped the whole ninja leaving only the mask in its original location. This was to match the lighting of both the mask and the robe.

The background was made with filtered clouds, motion blur, then a gradient overlay.

Overall, this probably was the hardest step. Because of alot of trail and error throughout it, the only decent step picture I could use was that of the final result.

In a seperate document, I combined and arrow and the flames from the provided source links. If you're interested, flames were cut out with color range select.

Pasted the flaming arrow into the main document. I also re-added the eyes from the ninja mask photo, after deciding that they was the best match for the picture.

These were another two pictures I took, of my gloved hands in two different positions. One will be catching the arrow, the other, wielding the katana.

First I pasted the left-hand glove over the arrow. To give the arrow the impression of a fast (interrupted) flight, I motion blurred a copy of it beneath it, did a lighter motion blur to the arrow itself, then used liquify and motion blur on the flames to make them look flatter and brushed back in speed. I then used a bit of dodging and burning on the glove, as well as a hue-blending brush to make it catch the glow of the flames.

Cut out the right-hand glove and the katana and pasted them into the main document. As you can see in the picture, I am in the process of selecting the fingers behind the transparent katana. Once the fingers were selected, I moved them on a layer over the katana. (See next step.)

Got the glove to grip the katana, with added shadow beneath the fingers.

The blur here is basically a extremely motion-blurred copy of the katana, which I warped to fit the blade and faded with several different strengths of erases. The blade is desatured by a hue-blended white blob which I just painted over part of the katana.

Cut and pasted the two watermelon halves from the provided source links. Gave them motion blur, and a motion blur trail using a similar technique as with the katana and arrow.

Painted in some juice splash using the water splash Photoshop brushes provided in the source link. Motion blurred the whole thing after and added a few extra particles.

Here I cut out a few seeds from the original watermelon, darkened them with curves, and pasted them randomly over the juice splash.

Just a small side detail: used liquify on the eyes to make them appear more scrunched and ninja-like.

I cut out a chunk of wood from the wood texture (see source link) and touched its edges with these awesome "torn edges" Photoshop brushes. Link is provided here, since I had no space to mention it on the main entry page.

Here I used the pen tool to cut a jagged edge through the wood (*phew*) and divided the wood onto the seperate layers.

Used perspective distortion and transformation to align the broken plank halves behind the foot as shown.

To make the wood appear 3D, I duplicated the wood about 4 times behind itself, one after another, to get the shown result. This was repeated on the opposite half as well.

Finishing the wood: I fixed up some unnatural edges of the wood with the torn edges brushes from step 16 and erased the 3D edge behind where the wood splits. I added shadow with a large, soft brush (on a seperate clipping mask layer) and used level adjustments and motion blur on the 3D edge layers to make them more realistic.

Using this picture (see source link) I cut out several small splinters for the shattered wood. Man, that took a while...

Here I arranged and transformed all the cut splinters from the previous step. Some of the smaller splinters are simply duplicates.

Curves, motion blur, and slight shadow and added to the splinters.

Here are all the final touch-ups: shadow with a large soft brush added to the watermelon; some cloning and size increase on the right leg and foot to make it look more natural; slight drop shadow and size-reduction of the splinters; added the wood of the board as a texture over the splinters; deleted the blur trail of the watermelon for a cleaner look (thanks, Wazowski). And it is complete!