sometimes simple things look better than complicated ones......
they ALWAYS look better.....
that is if it has made tastefully...
yeah, the set I used while ago, I made it myself, used only 2 pictures, resizing, contrast, sharpen & blur tool and the magic wand 
all the tools I used
sooo, simple is better often
nay, if it is tasteful it is
always better
it is hard to make a actually tasteful sign/ava that is complicated, way to little room for that.
I find that simple crop all sign out of one image most of the time is the best thing to do for a sig/ava. Because:
1. no problems with background, as it is quite hard to fit image with by perfectly, if there already is a decent background
2. no problems with cropping out the part of the image to place in the sig, no time wasting and no creepy pixels around the render
3. it does not look image look to messy, to crowded or how ever else it can be called. One should not put to much of everything in one thing.
4. most of the time it blends in really nice and does not make one think that that is just 2 (or more) images that happens to be occupy the same space, but have nothing what so ever to do with one another
5. and other reason I can not think of right now
Of course, one can do all that complicated stuff, but I have rarely seen that it looks good. I also dislike non simple outline of the sign if it is filled with load of stuff, like Tatsujin does most of the time. One can not enjoy something like that. Background is just a background it should not overwhelm the main image and outline should not overwhelm the image or background. In most of Tatsujin signs all I see is bunch of messy colors and lines in a strange frame....
I can agree that he is skill full and will not deny it, but I can not say that he has a good taste (for my understanding of nice and beautiful)
So i tried to make something simple using GIMP. however. it ended up TOO simple.
source image:
I was actually supposed to follow this cool(i can't find it right now) sig tutorial.
however, I ended up making the above instead as following the said tutorial with gimp was impossible for me, since the interface of the two apps are far too different and there were too many stuff that was in photoshop but not in GIMP. However, come to think of it, the developers themselves never said that GIMP was an alternative to Photoshop, the only ones i've seen claiming otherwise are opensource fanboys. oh well, at least i had a warm up project that took half an hour(because I had to crop reimu out in my base image, like i said, it was supposed to be more complex)
Imma gettin photoshop tomorrow.
the only thing I see wrong with this image
(beside the fact that I dislike having transperent signs if the render is not complete, but just cropper at some parts like here hair and ribbon) is that background is brighter then the girl and she kind of fades away and is not the centre of attention as I think she should be...
