Newbie here!

[Dark_Angel]

Bunch of junk I did

[MartinBabies]

First of all you need more variation in the brushing (I actually prefer not to use brushes, and just make everything myself, but that's has nothing to do with this). On the first the render's blending is ok. Could be better, but it works. Try to blend the text too!
On the second one, same for the brushing, but the render is bad blended. Just putting an outer glow on the render doesn't solve anything in this situation. Try blending it using the same way as the first, and maybe lower the saturation to something around 0-15. Text is worse here, the font is very non-stylish and should be changed. So change font, and try to blend it. First of all take off that shadow.
Hope that helped.