Just wondering what you guys think of it. C&C very welcome here..thanks.

Hmm... the background looks really cool, but your subject doesn't blend very well. You might want to try feathering the edges a bit.
It's also really empty on the left hand side. Maybe add some text?

Yeah I was thinking off adding some text, but I'll feather the edges too. Thanks Ally.

Yes what Ally said, I think you need to add in more of his shroud.. that red would set it off if you blended it all together well.. but nice looking all the same

Yeah the render I used didn't have his shroud, so I used another render of him I had and I got the second one I just edited up there...

I still think you need to feather the edges some more. They are just too sharp and it doesn't blend well with the background.

I made this little mini-kinda-tutorial-but-not-really to show Palagrin what I meant by feathering the edges. It might help you understand what I mean by the edges being sharp and why it doesn't blend right.

PART 1 :: Here we have the main image of Gandalf (left) and the blank Sig with a black fill (right)

PART 2 :: As you can see, I have selected the outline of Gandalf (left) that I want to use.

PART 3 :: This is an example of an unfeathered edge (right).

PART 4 :: This is an example of a 10 pixel feathered edge (right).

If you use photoshop, the feather box should be located in the upper left corner. You fill in the amount of pixels you want to be feathered once you have selected the Lasso Tool. If you don't use photoshop, you might want to look for some online tutorials or ask someone you know who has the program you use.

Okay I feathered the edges and added some text and got this:


Should I have feathered it a little more?

That looks much better, but maybe you should work a little more with the background. To me it looks a little empty. The lightnings are starting to look really cool, could still use a little more work though. And the word on the second line to the left is very hard to read because of the lightning underneath.

I looks a lot better. Great job with the feathering!

Now, what I would do is maybe lighten the sig a bit more, because it's really dark. You might also want to try using a different font. Right now the letters are hard to read and the color clashes with the lightening. Maybe try moving it so that it's over the clouds. The subject still kind of stands out a bit, so maybe you should try Matching the colors. If you have photoshop, all you have to do is go to "Image" then "Adjustments" then "Match color. At the bottom of the box that comes up, make sure you select the sig file for "source" and select 'merged' for "image" (I think it's image... I'm at work so I can't double check). Then you can play with the bars until you find the combination that works the best. Hopefully that should make it a lot better, but it's still really good for your skill level. =]