Wow, rob. Very impressive. Nothing I can add.
edit: Forum icon: I like the second version most. How did you do that? Maybe I can suggest another version. What things are important? Size?
I want to try an icon with a boxing ring, cause we don't have such an icon in brawl so far.
1. Truncated explanation - I took an image of two boxing gloves and an image of a trophy and made the backgrounds transparent for both. Then I superimposed the trophy on top of the gloves. Final touches were zooming in and using pixel-by-pixel "pencil" tool to smooth out the shared edges between glove-and-trohpy. (Note: I used Paint.NET freeware for all editing steps and previewed in my imgur)
2. Important things:
- Not copyright materials.
- Good resolution/appearance at non-small scale.
- End goal of 32px x 32px means images smaller than 32x32 or much larger than about 300x300 are hard to integrate together.
* A boxing ring, eh? That could be a good idea.