Ok I am here to show off my 2 banners i have made. I made one of them a few minutes ago and the other last week. I am just getting into GIMP so they might not be very good.

My first graphic is a banner I made for my website.



This was a very basic design. I simply used a gradient for the background and default fonts. If you look closely in the background I added the game logos of 3 popular Wii games. This is the current banner of my website. I dove into this with Nintendo in mind. I really like the result despite no border.



My new signature. I made this just a few minutes ago and it took about an hour to make. I was going for a smoke effect with the background. I created a custom brush and gradient and used an airbrush for the background. For a border I used a second layer with the same gradient as the background. I like the effect of it quite a bit. I dove into this as an experiment with a smoke effect and decided to fully use it. The fonts are default and the Triforce was found on Google Images.

Well, there are my two signatures/banners I have made. Please comment on them and let me know how i'm doing as a graphics artist. Thank you.

As with all sigs and banners of this sort, a good render improves the sig a lot. Consider downloading some pre-cutout renders from Saint_Michael's render packs. The topic where you can find links to these packs is pinned in the Resources forum. Brushes is another thing that really help out sigs. The latest version of the GIMP supports Photoshop 6 brushes. Also, there are some really nice GIMP brushes available in DeviantArt.

The sig is actually quite good for the GIMP. I use the GIMP myself, so i know that it requires more manual work. The banner isn't that bad, but the Samus render seems to match the background more than Link. Nice watermark on it, by the way. Inspiration helps get new ideas for sigs. The more you do new things, the more you'll get used to the program, which would reduce the time it takes to make a sig or banner.

For smoke effect, it's good to mess around with the brush tool, the blur tool and the smudge tool.

Thank you Truefusion for the comments. Also, I just made a new siganture:



This is another signature I made while experimenting. I was just messing around and decided to make a signature. I used a default gradient and a custom brush for the background. The gradient was simply from FG to BG and that is why its red like that. I used a font called Jazz that came with Finale Notepad 2008 I think. The Inuyasha render was found on google. I really like this one because of its background. I attempted using something I have never used before: color balance. That is how I got the background to be fairly blended. Well enjoy this signature.

Here's the thing. With forum signatures, you want to easily see the focal (usually the face or main part of a render / stock), along with a nice background, effects, depth, flow, and composition. What you're doing here is sticking some renders on and not bothering with blending and proper effects.

A good signature size is 380x120 pixels. That gives enough room to play around with.

All in all, it's not the best, but it's not the worst. Just read up on some tutorials at some places. (but remember, don't follow a tutorial exactly, experiment to see what you like best!)