So I am out of time! Lets go back to the first post…
StephSzr said:
I'm still pretty new at VFX. ...
I want to try and do as many entries as possible by January. :B
Ah, so young. So naive. 
These are what I ended up with!
Thank you to everyone for the comments and feedback! Especially Gannon, Yanni, Jchisolm, and Jordanov. 
Hopefully this is just the start; it would be interesting to attempt this again sometime to see if I have improved!
Thanks again!