It actually looks like one little black mage standing out from a crowd of black mages... it's cute. :3
I won't go into detail with tips and suggestions and stuff, I'll just touch on some points briefly and then you can think about them when you start on something new.
1. Composition. This is making the best use of space, positioning key objects like a character or text someplace that makes good sense. Keeping all areas of the image balanced, so that the eye doesn't ignore huge areas of the picture, thus making them go to waste.
2. Redundancy. Try not to have large areas with no use. With your current example, you can quite safely chop off 50 pixels from the left and about 100 from the right, and not lose anything but patterned background. Simply put, to justify the height or width of your sig, it is best to make all areas important to the overall picture.
3. Text. And an additional 'must' rule when using outer glow: change the default colour, otherwise everybody recognises it and it stands out in a rather ugly fashion,
even if that colour is what you intended. Even if you still want a yellow outer glow, change its shade from the default. Trust me on that. Besides the "outer glow rule", the position, size, and style of text is important. Place it in a space that doesn't look random - usual good text areas include the upper/lower border of the image at either the left or right side, or aligned to the middle of the vertical axis at either the left or right side. In signatures where there is little detail, larger text seems to look best. Otherwise, you may prefer it to be small and fit more with the details around it.
Hope this is helpful to you. Keep practicing and experimenting, and never be afraid to ask for comments and critisisms on your work. It is the
only way anybody ever tunes their skills.
Keep up the effort!
(Edit: changed "horizontal" to "vertical". Basically I mean "in the middle of the top and bottom height of the image".
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