spekkio

First off, welcome to AP. Now, I completely agree with Rukawa in that it's overfiltered. Your text would look better if it blended into the paper more, too. This is just my opinion: if you're going to stick with the grayscale, I think it would look a lot better with the color inverted. Hope this helped.

It's a good wall, very well done, although that blueish underlay makes the hair an sword look a little messy. As for the background, I'm a sucker for the simplistic, so I like it (If there's no empty space, where would the icons go, right?). Hope this helped.

This has style. It has a very urban feel to it that blends well with the character's image. And it helps that I always was a major fan of Hughes.

I'm not sure if you have the pen tool in CS2, but if you do, that's a really good way to extract images. Granted, it may take some time depending on the size of your scan but chances are it would take longer with the magic wand tool. You should note that the pen tool is pretty much useless if you're trying to extract complicated images (ex. hair). Hope this helps.

Wow. I didn't think anyone would reply that quickly. Okay-dokey, I took clarings advice and toned down the glow with a more grayish colour (thanks for the advice). And instead of vectoring the resized image, I took the original scan, vectored that and used that one instead in a document that was meant to be 1440x900.