Rob Flash work... BUTTONS!

In robs lesson this week we learnt more about rollover buttons, (these are used all over the web and in games i have examples in one of my eariler posts, the below images are all done by me)

so this first set of images is the 1st, one i made, very basic, playing around with the effects and shadows and (in this case) failing to make the button work the way i wanted (i.e. when you move the cursor over it, it should look like your pressing it in, however i messed up with the shadows and it doesnt look right). so here are my basic buttons:

so it really doesnt look like its been pressed in, more like the shadow has made a jump forward...
moving on:

the image below is off the second button i made, using more methods, brushes, layers, effects and colouring to give it an effect. The task was to get an image of a favourite character of ours (yes i know i have two... but it works and i like it ;) and put it on the button with an interesting/attracive background, and then add the rollover effect (i.e. so it looks like its a button when pushed).
here is the image i will comment below:

Now the 1st most noteable thing is that unlike the first button where the shadow moved, this button looks like its actually been pressed down as the shadow remains (just about) the same. For the colours i used one of the custom brushes in photoshop and layered it, giving the very misty blue effect. I also made the two characters (Ike from fire emblem radiant dawn and date masamune from the sengoku basara series) black and white so they dont contrast with the background colour and fit in nicely. As i said this was all done in layers, so i then added a very low opacity white to add the 3-D shiny effect to the top. also if you look closly there is a grid along most of the image (rubbed out in some places to not cover the characters) which i did on a separate page of photoshop, (very small page) and then made into a pattern and made it an overlay for this image.
i really enjoyed doing it and am very pleased with the results, and i think it looks very good (maybe not as good as some of the creative button I linked in my older post however for my first attempt i'm happy)

please comment and feedback :)