need help making a graphic

I need a graphic for my interview with Dan tomorrow night - actually a photo, but I'm a bit uncomfortable passing pictures of myself around. I mean, I do it occasionally but I try to minimize it and keep it to friends. So I started playing around with an illustration of Smaug done by John Howe and some of my favorite quotes that might be appropriate to what I image Dan and I will be talking about.

Here are two possibilities I produced this afternoon. Nothing fancy, just cropping and text overlay in MS Paint:

( Read more... )

I'm not particularly crazy about either one of them; the second quote is better, I think, but it was longer so I made the text smaller and am not sure how it works as a graphic.

Thoughts? Do you like them? Does anyone who has some time this afternoon and who is good at image-work think they can do better? I'd love to have someone more skilled than I am clean it up...