CounterStrike Sig

The first step that I usually do is to create a new layer and name it "Background", and fill it Black (or any other color, I just like black background for game themed sigs).

Now that we have a black rectangle, first lets make a nice line along the bottom where we can put a quote or clan name or something along those lines. Were going to be creating a pattern here, so go to File -> New and create a new 5 pixels by 5 pixel document with a name of your choice (pattern1 or something along those lines would be fine). Then use your pencil tool, setting it to 1 pixel size, and zoom in as far as you can and create a pattern like this (unless you want to do something different) with a light color of your choice:

then go to Edit -> Define Pattern and call it whatever you want. Next select the area of the signature you want to have the pattern over it, usually the bottom or the top, like this:



Then you would go to Layer -> New Fill Layer -> Pattern. And select your pattern that you just created. I found a scale of 5% to be the sweet spot for my pattern, but everyone is different so just experiment until you find a size that your happy with.



Now you should have something along these lines, your pattern may be a little different:



Next Were going to add some nice text to that bar at the bottom, for mine I just used the Alexis Bold font (Size 30, AA: Crisp). Make a new text box and write your text, then change the blending modes to match the following below:





Also don't forget to change the layer blending option to "Hard Mix" and the Fill to 72% (or as you feel necessary), see below if you don't get what I mean:



After all that blending work you should have something like below:



The next thing your going to want to do is insert some models or pictures into the background to fill the empty space, i just googled for some counter-strike images and decided to use these two edited images:



After putting them into the signature, and rotating them a bit, it turned out like this:



The next step is to put your name into this signature, since my name is Avery, ill use that in this example. The font I used is called "Ethnocentric", what were going to do is create two text layers, one with size 24 for your tag and the other at size 36 (depending on how long your name is you might want to use either smaller or larger sizes) for your name. Make the blending settings for both of them the same as below:




Now you should have something like this:



What we really need next is a border, its quite simple to add a nice one which will do, if you want to be fancy you can do more. Go to you background layer, right click on it and select Blending options, check Inner Glow, and make the settings the same as mine for a nice glowing border effect:



Now it should look like this, the border was to take the suddenness (if that's a word) of the edge off:



Basically the only thing we haven't done is add a nice abstract or techy background on our signature. You can find some excellent brushes at Deviant Art, after fooling around with some abstract brushes and color overlays on the "TAG |", I came out with this:



The color I used that worked out quite nicely against the black background for the brushes was #55677a, which by the way looks like this: