Pen Tooling and Blending Opts. (XS Fire)

Nothing really fancy, just thought I'd share.

 

It looks pretty good cept whatever is between the bottom of the x and middle of the s. Can i ask what that is? Other then that not bad, makes me really wanna get better at pen tooling.

 

I like the variation, though the pentooling itself should be sharp, and the background should be far less sharp - i'm guessing that you sharpened after applying image here?

 

What do you mean? The background?

Actually I used lighting effects on the bg, duplicated it, set dup to overlay. Then changed the hue to a redish. Then erased the edges of it. There is also black and white clouds on top of that layer set to color dodge. The clouds do make it look too sharp.
The effects around the pen tooling are just made by using clone stamp tool. I don't know how to sharpen that, as the whole layer is basically just scattered pen tooling and blending options..