Summoner's First Sig and Avatar Design.

Pick colors that complement your image- use the eyedropper tool and snag a color off of Ultimecia, and use that as a basis, instead of coming up with some idea like "Space", making a background that fits that, and trying to mash Ultimecia into it. These blues that you are choosing do not look pretty with the images you select.

And if you'd layer your effects a little more, your images would blend in better. What it looks like to me is that you added the image as an afterthought. Add your image early on and build your effects around it.

Demaian is right about the lack of depth, too. But that happens when your background is one solid pattern and one color. Vary it up a bit- look at the tag Ventus is using.

There are a lot of colors in there, but they all look pretty with the stock image.

Maybe try using some textures.

Well, the colors you choose do tend to be blinding, along with the patterns, but the sig as a whole is just extremely blurry, and I'm not really sure what you did to make it that way. There should be a tool that you can use to sharpen it.

 

Well, the background is somewhat improved. The coloring is much more pleasant to look at and the effects aren't quite so monotonous, though it still lacks depth. But you have the same problem as before with blending in the render. It continues to look like you made a background and were planning on using just that as your sig, but then stuck a render on top, just for the heck of it. The render also looks very distorted to me, like you tried to resize it but didn't do it properly. The text needs work. I don't like the font, color, or placement. It distracts from the rest of the signature.

This one's better than the last two. Keep practicing.

 

1) I'm not sure if you get what I mean by render. When I use the word, I mean any image that's been removed from its background, i.e the render of Dagger/Garnet you used earlier.
2) I can't understand how you could think that your render was well blended. You can see the sharp outline of it against the (flat) background. And the problem with the render is not that it is too sharp, it's that the render is distorted. The faces of the characters are stretched out, yet squashed-looking at the same time.



This is probably the best you've done so far, if only because you've experimented more on adding effects and making a respectable background. But, terrible placement of the Edea image. You can barely even tell it's there- I missed it the first time I looked at it. And it's again a rather low quality image- her pose doesn't lend itself to being the focus of a signature, in my opinion, and parts, like her one arm, look too blurry.

The latest two are terrible. Sorry, but there it is. Same problems with low quality, blurry, possibly distorted renders, same problem with the renders not being a part of the signature, but just laid on top of a background for seemingly no reason, same problems with painfully bright colors and too much contrast. Text is the same as it has been.

Needs work.

 

I think either you have a completely different idea of what "high quality stock" means than me, or else you don't know how to keep images in proportion when you resize them, or both, because I don't think it is just my computer making the anime guy/animal look all stretched out weirdly, or the chick look so blurry. If that were the case, every image on my screen would look like piss, and it's only your signatures that are doing it.

Well, I see no reason why you need two threads to post your work. Thread title is being changed and threads are being merged.

 

Avatar is kinda big, imo. The cut around Namine is sloppy, particularly around the hair. The colors at least look pretty with Namine, though again, Namine is just sitting on top of the background. It doesn't feel like one coherent piece of art. Essentially, the same criticism I've been giving on your signatures.

 

I don't notice a glow in the area where I think the cut looks particularly bad.

No, there's a difference. Your signatures lack depth, but really, I don't think I can articulate the difference, except the obvious that Demaian's sigs are better made. When I look at the Ventus sig (to keep using that example), it just looks like one piece of art to me. Your signatures (and the avatar, too) look like separate pieces glued together. I can't describe it any better than that.