The Dying Sea

[Ascension]

First off, nice font and I like what you're doing with the gradient and warp on those. The borders seem ok to me but I'm wondering if you're going for the "glow" look...in which case you just make a selection, plop down a color into the shape then reduce the selection, feather the selection, and then delete the middle out of it leaving a glowing ring of color. You could also just reduce the opacity of the color or change blend mode but that kinda ruins the parchment look. If you want exact steps it's in my atlas tutorial but there are some other tuts here that go into it as well.

The main thing is the water, it looks like a photoshop distort-glass-filter and not hand-drawn like the other parts and it gives me a lil bit of a disconnect. It's not a big thing and if you like it that's all that matters really Overall quite nice to look at.

[Diamond]

Yeah, I agree with you on the water efx. It was in the nature of an experiment, one that didn't turn out exactly as planned.