I just had a few images I wanted to use, and a copy of GIMP and I thought I'd dive right in with the tutorials.

I couldn't follow any of them in the slightest but I managed to mess around with the selection tools, layers, image scaling and some of the filters to come up with what you see below.

Started at roughly 10PM, finished just now at 3AM.

If I might offer a suggestion, I would try and avoid making the image look squished... if you just copy and paste the image onto a new layer, and then hit scale layer, you should be able to resize it without squishing it.

Just ask if you want any help with Gimp. I've been using it for about 4 or 5 years now.

I cut the borders off it (it had 2 black borders on top and bottom) to avoid the majority of the squishing that occurred with scaling the layer. Those mechs actually look a bit mashed in the original pic too (at least they did on my 16:10 netbook where I got the image to start with, not so much on my 16:9 display) but nowhere near the level that occurred with the scaling.

In larger size, the text actually looked chromed, thanks to a combination of a drop shadow and embossing but shrunk down to fit onto the sig it just looks like it's a bit of a pixellated mess since I applied the effects to the text in a different canvas so I could work on them in a higher resolution (98x98p/in) as opposed to the resolution of the sig itself which is only about 78x78p/in.

Black border came out better than I expected but for some reason it applied a small white bar to the bottom which I couldn't remove at all, guess I could just copy/paste out of the jpg file to get rid of it, that would only require a 10 second Paint-shopping.

My main concern was that I lost so much fidelity from the original image when I scaled it down and yet your sigs appear to have lost very very little in the scaling process. I know I'm just a noob but it seems like  very harsh drop that mine has suffered, guess that's what I get for changing the vertical ratio when scaling it - I couldn't even keep to the 400x120 guideline in the tutorial.

Still, I appreciate the feedback and I like the criticism, helps me learn how to do things a bit better if I decide to try again.

Well if you can't follow our signature tutorials, there's actually plenty more out there made by other people. Just look for "gimp signature tutorial" in google images.

I wish I had a way to make a video tutorial. I feel like that would make stuff so much easier to understand.

You could possibly record off screen with a piece of software like Livestream (they use a thing called Procaster that you can get off their website).

Fraps can obviously record off-screen but you're limited to 30 second clips with the free version, but you can just use windows movie maker to stitch them together I believe.

You could also just use print screen to take a series of detailed stills and then use windows movie maker to stitch them together into a video and add either captions or record an audio track for yourself.

Audacity is great audio recording/editing software and very easy to use (free too!).

No doubt people like PstrDan know better when it comes to doing something with audio but I'd be willing to help you put something together if you wanted.

I may consider trying something in the near future. I have audacity as well as windows movie maker. But it would be better to actually record on screen so I can point to stuff with the mouse. It would be much more in depth.

True, but you can also edit the pictures to highlight things (since the video will likely end up being compressed to something like youtube standards for easy uploading).

There's a variety of ways to do it, key is to find something that works well for you.