On my image I have three images of earth, with somewhat rough edges. Does anyone know the best way to smooth those out? 

Here is my collage, titled Welcome Home. I themed it around my home town, Fort Worth. There is this place in downtown called the Stockyards, where Western Cowboy history survives, where nobody can forget the city's origins, and where there is fun for everyone. I threw in a longhorn and the "Fort Worth Stockyards" banner to add some authenticity. I decided to put the Texas flag as the sky, mainly because I thought it looked cool. The focus of the picture, though, is the little boy running right past the "New Life" sign to go back home. You can take whatever you want from it, I just thought I would be a little more straightforward than most other people - mainly because I don't have that creative edge.

Please click the image to see it larger!

I hope you like it--I certainly had fun making it. Although I've done this before, I still had to work really hard, and I welcome your criticism/comments! Let me know if something looks weird or doesn't fit, although I intended for certain elements to stand out more than others.

Rather than using layer mask on Photoshop, I used mainly selection tools like the magic wand, quick selection, and select color range. This helped me extract elements from their original backgrounds and integrate them into mine.

Yes, I know this may seem quite busy, but that's just my style! Sometimes simple and clean is harder to achieve than complex and busy, so this really was easier for me than choosing two or three essential images.

While looking for a picture to spark some artistic creativity, a photograph of a girl walking in the rain and looking down really stood out to me. It was alluring and curious. You kind of wondered why she was looking down and the image of her walking in the rain with nothing else in the image created a very lonely feeling. On top of that, the black and white really added to the tone of the photograph. That's when I decided I wanted to add elements to try to explain why she was walking alone and looking so somber.

This was the original photograph. I used an image of a boat on a lake to blend onto the bottom to create a look of her sort of drowning in the sorrow of the rain.