smitty heres my word of advice: try renders more... your better works are the ones where it looks like you started with a render, simplify your fonts, fonts that are too fancy sort of confuse the eye on sigs, rule of thumb: the fancier the pic/render, the simpler the font you want, if you have a really dull kind of abstract sig or w/e you could put fancy font as the focus... that kinda thing. experiment with lighting and lensflare (for some reason i think urs would look nice with some flaaare)
like darky said, tutorials. example: my sig, that spark over the gun... took that "lighting" trick straight from a tutorial.
lastly (for now) gets some higher-quality material, even teh most basic gfxing looks pretty good on high quality materials
ps, OTL if you think u had a rough start,... oh god... go look at my first gfx attempt on my gallery.....
edit: i wouldnt get that many brushes..... .__. i generally get what im looking to use for a particular project....
edit again: another trick ive learned is placing brushes btwn things in the sig gives great depth: example... in my sig... i had to erase the part of the brush that was covering the gun pointing forward.... so that it'd look like its going under... that kinda thing... try that
edit again
cuz i changed my set >.>