Ok you need brushes but with no brushes you did very well. GO here.. www.subzer0hosting.com/forums and register on there forums. When you do go to "Design Help" theres a big ass list of brushes. And stay around and post some if your cool
They're all really good for a beginner, but once you include good blending of pictures, fonts, and add some nice borders, its going to look awesome. BTW, great job!
deffintly better...nice...but u need some fonts...goto dafonts and download the fonts strait to the fonts folder...My pc>Hard drive>Windows>fonts there u go
Looking at your red one, try to do a bit more blending. For simple, effective blending, circle the area you want blended with the Lasso Tool, then right click on the selected area and click Feather. Put it somewhere around 15 - 25 px feather (or whatever number you want for the effect you want). After feathering, push the layer mask button (at the bottom of your layer palette). Otherwise, excellent improvement.