Blends?

[Sailor Cybertron]

Photoshop people, I need your help!

I want to make a new header/profile banner for my LJ using textures and stuff. I want to do a blend, but most of the tutorials I find aren't very helpful. Most of them deal with celebrities I have no interest in, so I can't find any tutorials dealing with animated stuff. I'm not sure if I should remove the background entirely, crop it, remove some of the background, or what. In short, I don't really know where to begin... I'm more used to making icons, and my avatar over there is actually one of my fancier ones. So yeah, I'm a little lost when it comes to doing things on a bigger scale.

I'm using pictures of Sari from Transformers Animated for my new layout, so here's some examples of what I want to use. They're screencaps from TV rips (I usually use screencaps from DVDs, but it's not on DVD yet), so they aren't the best quality.
i28.tinypic.com/29fs1fo.png
i28.tinypic.com/5dkpx0.png
i26.tinypic.com/29o36yo.png

Anyone have any beginning tips on blending? I'm using Photoshop CS2. I have some textures to use and I'm pretty sure what I want it to look like, but like I said, I just don't know where to start. Thanks!

[Ellethwen]

I have a blend tutorial that was pretty basic and used a painted picture as a base -- I've used the same effect on animated stuff, and it turned out quite well. I had it up on DA, but they removed it (said it was "copyright infringement", which it isn't), but I can upload it to Imageshack if you want to take a looksie.

Also, most blend tutorials dealing with real people will work just fine on animated stuff.

[Sailor Cybertron]

Sure Ellethwen, I'd love to take a look!

Ah, the other tutorials I've found will probably make more sense when I'm awake and not so distracted. I spent so much time going through my episodes taking screencaps that my attention span just kind of disappeared. They just weren't doing it for me tonight. XD

[Ellethwen]

Okies, here you go: img292.imageshack.us/img292/6668/blendtut01gf8.jpg

It's pretty big. I hope you can understand it

Yeah, I've had that issue too. It's just like, "Wait...waaahhhh? Color...balance? What's that?" :-P