Renders by Tokugawa Katsumoto

This here is my first attempt at making my very own signature. I am trying to make it better with GIMP on ubuntu. Any tips on how to blend it better would be welcome. I am also trying to get a pic of a firey tiger in the background as well.

Spoiler:

After using the smudge and blur tools on GIMP this is what I have. Would anyone like to critique it?

Spoiler:

I got ya. Well, a more realistic, and perhaps more dramatic, picture of your faceclaim could really draw in the people looking at your picture. The background appears cheap, poor quality, and fairly cliche. If you could perhaps just google a more suitable flaming background, that would help your picture as well. The text however, you did a fairly good job on. It's a sharp font without round-offs, which is appeasing to the eye in signatures, making the name clearly stated. Also, you might think of trying a glow effect on the outside of whatever image you choose to be your character in the picture. Make the glow contrast but fit with the background to make it blend well.

Are then any good tutorials on how to do the glow? And where can I find a better flaming background?

Well it all depends on the program. On Photoshop all you have to do is right click, go to Edit Layer Style, check the "glow" box, check the "outside" box, then select opacity and size.

But you're using GIMP-yada yada, which I'm not familiar with. I never used any tutorials or lessons or anything with mine, I just sorta sat down and messed with it for a few hours to figure everything out. I'm sure if you explore enough you can find it, and if you run out of options, looking it up on Bing or Google might work.

An example of a better background might be just another picture just with sharper edging. Just.. clearer colors, less pixelation and blurs, anything like that. Just keep looking, try some more out, and see what you like. I'm here to help any way I can with your future projects.

General note: Normally using some sort of glow is a good thing to separate the main focus of the image from the bg.

However, your samurai render has a unclean edge and even though it looks slightly better after the smudge/blur the white glow effect it has looks sort of tacky against the red and orange flames. As far as tutorials for these sorts of things though, they only help to teach you how to make the specific image in the tutorial, everything you "learn" by doing them can be accomplished by just messing around with the tools a bit so just keep making things and eventually they will get better.

Thanks guys. I found a better render and I will play around with the tools a bit more. I didn't do a white glow but I guess it did it on its on. Hmm seem's I got a lot to learn. I remember how some cool people did some of my old sigs, or how they looked. I'll post them up here for inspiration. Takeshi and a other guy, sadly I forgot his name did some for me a while back. Here they are, within a week I hope to have my second try.

My first character that Tak did for me back when we were on a bleach site.

Spoiler:

This was from the TW site I was on when I played the mod third age total war

Spoiler: