I really like the composition of the first image. However, not to sound dist-rust-spectful (you started it!), but if it were me, I would try to tone down the purple. The nails have a strange rotten meat look to them. The rusty color of Mount Rustmore looks nicer.

ha-HAHH!!

I originally chose rust for 2 reasons... 1. There's plenty of rusty stuff around here, and 2. it's specific. Nothing drives creativity to the limit more than tight restrictions. Seriously! There's a billion ways of depicting emotion, and surrealism as well to those experienced with it, but what can you do with rust? You have to get creative, that's what! You have to come up with ways of incorporating this specific theme into images depicting a variety of styles, whether it be surrealistic or emotional or whatever you can conceive. I would also consider allowing for anything akin to rust, such as other forms of decay or man-made objects in states of disrepair.

Hey, I'm a bit new so I have to ask... do you accept photos from digital cameras for these contests? If so, I'm voting for rust. There's some decent run down looking scenery in my area. The old Bethlehem Steel Plant is nearby to....

I've never successfully accomplished anything in photoshop using alpha channels. And thought I'm not sure I've seen what you're talking about, I've had plenty of my own problems just trying to get them to do anything useful. I find that any of the other programs I use (3ds max, after effects, paint shop pro) make more sense when using alpha maps. It's weird... I can make an alpha mapped image from 3DS Max and bring it into Adobe After Effects and see it properly masked. Bring it into photoshop, however, and there's no sign of the alpha map, just a white background where it was originally rendered black... hmm, that does sound VERY similar to your problem, though.

Out of curiosity, I checked to see if Paint Shop Pro could do it, and it turns out it does it the right way. What you do is open up all 3 images within PSP. Copy the image with the pillows you want to keep and paste it as a new layer (ctrl-L) on top of the other rendered image. Now, select the new layer and from the Masks drop down menu, select New - From Image. From the Source Window drop down, choose the B&W mask image. Leave "Source Luminance" selected (Source luminance will allow you to mask using shades of gray to produce varying degrees of transparency. Any Non-Zero Value will make everything that's not black 100% visible. You could probably use this setting, actually, if you're trying to remove anti-aliasing). Hit OK. That's it. The image I included just shows the pillows masked over a white background since in low res I can't tell which pillows were supposed to be non-antialiased.

I've never understood this about Photoshop... why can't you simply copy and paste an image into a layer mask? The procedure that Jasonmit is attempting is something I've never succeeded in doing properly, and always ended up having to use a color range selection on the B&W image and then deleting from the image I wanted to mask. Retrocity, I tried following what you did there, but I ended up with a similar red picture to yours. How do you actually make the red area transparent? It seems weird that this kind of 2d compositing is far simpler to do in 3ds max. Even after effects handles alpha channels better.