I prefer the mario one personally but i needed a change .. This is falco from starfox by the way .. So what you think?
word of advicee, blend your renders. it dosnt matter how awesome your background is, if your render doesn't look like a part of your sig, your sig won't look as good. What i suggest for blending a render is -Duplicate Render -On the bottom one, set it to gaussian blur [around 20] then place a clolored gradient above the hole image [like for yours it could be clue to black] -then set the top gradient layer to overlay this way the sig looks fluid
I prefer a hard brush with Shape Dynamics, scattering, etc. (If you use GIMP, I don't know if you'll get that.)