Well, I've been working on two sigs for the SOTW contest. I'm not sure which one to enter because they're so different.

Here's sig #1. I was flipping through a tattoo magazine and got inspired by some of the flash in the back. An artist had drawn women leaning and lying on tiki gods except that the style was much more shag so the women had a very 70s playboy bunny look, which is definitely not me. But I liked the idea, so I had to render two different pics and blend them together.


And sig #2. I wanted to try something with an actual person. And since my friends and I have been going to the beach every weekend and learning to surf, beach and surfing are synonymous right now. I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but I can only do so much with Photoshop 5.5.

I like the first one the most, everything blends in perfectly, really caught my eyes instantly.

The second sig is also very nice, but the words are kind of hidden in the water.

I can't give real advice on how to make the words come out more though, everyone has their own style,
but an inner or outer glowish effect can make the words come out a bit more.

*hides*

Photoshop 5.5!? Oh man, i've seen 5.5 before. Not recommended! Switch to the GIMP—you'll get more features. It may be harder to deal with on the brushes side and certain kind of effects ('cause it's more manual work), but the GIMP has added support for Photoshop 6 brushes (unless i'm mistaken with the delevopment version), and manual work may be more productive. Regardless, go with the GIMP.

As for the sigs:
The first one is better than the other. The first one may have looked better if you added in a gloss effect to the background. If you are unsure on how to go about in doing such, it's not hard, just a simple gradient. Also, moving the text a bit more inward towards the center may have helped the sig.

For the second one, the render is a bit blurry, but it feels that that's not really your doing. The blue text, it's not recommended to have text over renders, unless you can effectively get it to work well with the render. For the text "Tiki", it's a bit too close to the edge. Moving it more to the left would help a bit.

If i were to give a rating out of 10 for each, i would give the first one a 5.7/10 and the second one 5.65/10.

Interesting that you've gotten into sigs, though.

Heh, thanks for the comments! I really appreciate the suggestions. I'm still a noob at all of this.

I haven't really "gotten into" making sigs, I'm more just playing around and having fun. My stick figure sigs are really all I've got going for me and that's just because I've got a very twisted sense of humor more than anything else. Though I would rather not be a jack of all trades and master of none, I'm always eager to learn and experience new things. I'm the consumate student always seeking more knowledge and this world has so much to offer.
I did download GIMP to check it out, but I'm still really iffy on the interface. The filters seem different and the end product is sometimes... well, not what I had hoped for or expected. But I'm still playing around with it.