There is no particular order to these pieces. Some are several years old while some are from over the summer. I do not have a particular style, and like to try new things with each piece. I have marked any terms that might be confusing to those without a Photoshop or Illustrator background and provided explanations at the end of the post. All that being said, here is the design I have chosen for the first post.

I made this design over the summer. The render1 I decided to use is John Shepard from the Mass Effect video game series.  In this piece I decided to use clipping masks2 which is what produced the colorful shattered-glass effects around Shepard. I have not actually used clipping masks in some time, so that part of the design took much longer than I thought it would. It took several tries before I was happy with the result of the clipping mask. 

I actually like how the clipping mask turned out, even though it took longer than I thought. I think it compliments the color of Shepard's armor and skin tone nicely.

I do not, however, like how dark the rest of the signature ended up being. I used several layer masks3 to adjust the colors around Shepard. This also affected the other areas of the piece however, darkening them to almost a blur, especially on the left side. 

I had originally imagined this piece brightly lit throughout with Shepard being more in the dark, as that is how I imagined him while playing Mass Effect and wanted to recreate my vision of him. That vision inverted as I worked however and ended with Shepard being the spotlight while the rest is darkness. The inversion actually made me think about how I viewed the game and Shepard's role and I ended up replaying Mass Effect and making different decisions based on how this design turned out. 

Even though this piece turned out differently than I had originally wanted, I think this is one of my favorites so far. I really like how Shepard seems to be popping out of the signature and coming towards the viewer. If I tried this design again however, I would limit the number of layer masks I used to try and regain the original vision I had of a brighter design. 

Terms 
1 A render is an image with the background cut out.
2 A clipping mask is an object whose shape masks other artwork so that only areas that lie within the shape are visible—in effect, clipping the artwork to the shape of the mask.
3 A layer mask is used to control the transparency of parts of the design.