der ya go tell me what you think?

I think you still got a long way to go. A few things

1. The extraction is poor. You need to work on that. Practise!

2. The text is unreadable. Especially the Last Exile text

3. Just a duplicated background with a few filters on top doesn't cut it.

I recommend that you read the guide if you haven't done so

The extraction needs to be redone, the area where you duplicated the chara you see he border lines because you did't blend that area. THe font seems like it's on a rough default not smooth or is that the font itself? Well the font doesn't work. The duplicated image is blurred way to much. Last Exile has great artwork maybe you should try a bg with just a simple sky even, an airship or even something abstract to match the pilot's suit techy look. Keep at it!

Here is my second go round

Um... the text in the upper left still looks a little wierd because there isn't a constant size of black border.

Also, the character still looks a little pixelated (like around the chin). You might want to try to clean it up a little.

You might want to try to redo the text. Here are some font websites:

http://www.dafont.com/en/
http://www.highfonts.com/
http://www.abstractfonts.com/fonts/
http://www.fontgarden.com/
http://www.fonts4you.com/
http://www.dsg4.com/04/extra/bitmap/
http://www.orgdot.com/aliasfonts/
http://www.pixietype.com/

The second one looks alot better than the first. Its coming along well.