This is my first wall I've ever made. It took me a while to do because I did it on my laptop in Fireworks MX. I took a scan of an elf from the Shaiya series and extracted the scan. Added a background, the planet and explosion on it and the text. Any tips on improving my wall would be great it's probably going to be just used for personal use though(why I put water marking in).

P.S. A suggestion for a good free image editor would be great.

GIMP is a good share ware. it's comparable to photoshop.

your character is way too big for the rest of the wall. it looks like you sized her up anyways, so it might be better to just bring her back to her original size. if yo sized her down, then your going to have to work on the image quality, there's some pixelation on her. the earth doesn't look 3D enough for this image, it's also the wrong style of image for her, and looks like it's behind her at first glance. the star field is too generic and the colors don't make any impression. try to make your own star field, and use some colors from the rest of the images in the wall.

Nice!

But I think you could use more stuff in the background though. Right now your image looks a little off-center - you probably want something in the right lower corner to balance it out, like another planet or stuff. And the person looks a bit - I don't know, squished. She needs more space around her.

I actually sized down the scan quite a bit which is why it looks a little pixelated. I also think the earth doesn't look right because I haven't put in any shadowing yet. Any suggestions on making it more obvious that the planet is over her hand? I am also working on my own star field it's just taking a while. Oh and thanks for the freeware suggestion.

Thanks solitaryjane. Now that I look at it it does look a little blank on the right hand side. I think the character may look squished because it fills up the wall top to bottom so I'll work on that.