Blooper

Chris, you want your signature to be a scene. The starfield is a good start because it's a fitting background, but your render has a white light coming form the top-right, but the light source in your sig is behind him and it's red.

The blending is fine. You just need to add effects, like streaks of smudging or c4ds.

Great work on the background, but it seems the way the texture of the planet is applied onto the sphere is weird. It seems there's a lot of lines going like this:

You need to have an idea of what would be reflected, draw it in black and white, reshape it so it fits the perspective, set to color dodge, lower the brightness so that it looks good, then alpha-mask the reflections that don't land on the star.

Oh, I didn't see that part of your post. Either way, you need more reflections on the gold, sharp ones preferably.

The star doesn't look like gold because it lacks reflections. But the Walk of Fame's stars aren't golden.

To get the perfect selection, select the transparent area with the magic wand, fill in the selection on another layer; run Gaussian blur (~5px radius), and use the magic wand's tolerance to have an optimal selection, as opposed to relying on hit and miss.

The perspective is off, you should be seeing more of the upper face of the cylinder for the pawn. Also, that font isn't working with the sig, just go with all caps Arial in size 20. Nice concept, by the way

No, at least not on dA. The thumbnails get messed up if they have a transparent background, and besides it's a logo, the background it's on at the moment doesn't matter.

A personal logo. All heavily modified Helvetica, except for the heart.

I meant mine

That method is outdated, gradient mapping yields (or at least yielded, I don't know about the new version) better results. Isolate works too.

The effects are really messy, especially the yellows.

Abstract.

That bug's been filed so hopefully it'll be fixed soon.

That's excellent work, Skull. How about "barren"? Also, I'd suggest adding a layer, pasting the sig in it, and running autolevel, then playing with the layer's opacity to reach optimal contrast and brightness.

Thanks Rick

The line tool doesn't seem to be working properly... When I press Shift and draw, it ends up curving slightly on its own, no matter when I release shift. It's like this in v3.5 too. These are all with Shift pressed.

Doing it right now, but since it didn't mention it in the bug fixes I figured it wouldn't have changed. I'll report back in a minute. E// Nope, hasn't changed

Bump, any help for this?

It doesn't curve a whole lot but it's significant.

Whenever I try to draw a line while holding shift to keep the angle, when I release the mouse button, the line seems to curve on its own... This wasn't happening before v3.5. Am I missing something, or is it just a glitch?

He's right though, it's what most people's first animation is. And it's definitely not different

It's not RPG avatars we're talking about. The picture up to 120*160px wide and tall above your name is an avatar

This doesn't really count as a sig...