Thank you both very much. The last two were kind of accidents. On the second to last I went through the Optical Illusion tutorial and then hit it with the 3D plugin and like that enough to remove the optical illusion from the background.
On the last one (which is my favorite so far) I just started with Gradient bars straight up and down, then added Gradient bars at a sharp angle in the same layer, then recolored with Curves, put it all in 3D, drop shadowed, dented, zoom blurred and ended up with that.
So far I am really enjoying this program.