Cartoonish drawing rendering question

hi I’m wondering about how to render a image in this style
http://gilthorp.files.wordpress.com/2006/10/explosion.gif
whitout the letters of cause.
Or with colors like this
http://se4n.org/img/explosion.jpg
Or does I have to potoshop it?
For those of you waching heroes I’m talking about some sort of the mendeez style(yes it is the picture from the floor in his studio)

Image filters, color ramps, image nodes, mix nodes, shifting channels via separate and combine RGBA nodes and procedural textures in the compositor all work well for that type of stuff.