Sidereal

Blame it on my bad eyes or your sig, whichever's most probable

Focals are only useful in render/stock sigs, they're not always necessary for landscapes.In this case, I think it's the general lack of definition (it's blurry and there seems to be grass in the sky, if I'm looking at this right) that breaks it.

Front: 3 DJ: 0 Not because front's sig is great, but because the first is not outstanding enough. #winner frontcannon.

My face when I read that: It's time to celebrate for us three-digit layers artists.

I think you're talking about using the magic wand. What the magic wand will do by default is it will select all contiguous pixels that resemble the one you clicked. If you press delete after selecting them, these pixels will disappear. Any action you take while something is selected will only affect the selected pixels.

Ouch. It's very harsh. You don't want your effects to be too contrasted. You also need to add effects on top of your sprite (as in, same XY position, but on a layer above it), that's known as blending. Find some sigs of that style on deviantart and see how the effects are placed. You did a good job putting most of the effects around the focal though.

Doesn't making good use of stocks count as paint.NET ability? Using a stock isn't at all about pasting it in your work and leaving it as it is; using a stock is not necessarily the easy way to go about something, sometimes it's the way to make something new and exciting. And in an abstract piece, chances are a stock will not be the focus point. If it is, and the voters believe the work that has been done with this stock is minimal, unoriginal, or does not fulfill whatever criteria they use to judge entries,then they don't have to vote for it... And like I said, I don't use stocks in abstracts, and I very rarely use stocks outside of that. I just think you can do remarkable things with them, that not everyone is able to do them with only superficial knowledge of the way paint.NET works, and that those who can outperform others in that field should be rewarded. But of course, in the end, it's up to you to do what you think is right.

I'm not a huge stock user when it comes to abstracts (actually, come to think of it, I don't use any at all), but I think this rule is just a good way to limit creativity. If use of stocks makes brings down the value of a piece, I believe it should be up to voters to decide that that.

Good stuff! If you want to add an extra touch of awesome, try to taper the ends of the lines.

I vote for CT. although it's not a great sig, it's more complex than CSM's considering the background is a screenshot. The border is not adequate (gray would be better), and the opera logo could use some more gradient too. CT, The flow of your sig is bottom-left to top-right, whereas the render is going from bottom-right to top-left. This isn't particularly bad, but if you just flipped the whole background, it would look better. CSM: 1 CT: 1

Chill. I said "PaintFox wins", that basically amounts to the same thing. Besides, I'm sure if the host of this competition has a problem with the way I signified to everyone that PF won, he's capable of telling me that himself.

PaintFox wins because his sig is more original.

Made boring by the gradient map, sort of lacks highlights. Also, I don't really like the topaz on that.The actual manipulation is good work though.

Oh, hot damn. This is exquisite.

It's supposed to be an actual picture I think. I doubt anyone's going to be mad at you if that's not what you do though.