I started making banners with paint. When you do it with paint, you have to go in and delete every freakin' pixel. If the characters aren't cartoony and have black borders, then they don't turn out too well. After making it in paint, I would select all and paste it into a weak photo editing program that came with my computer to change it into a jpg.
The last banner I've done on paint was for an online RPG:
http://www.geocities.com/ssjkakkarot/pics/SJPBanner.jpg
After that, I joined a Web Page Design class which introduced me to Fireworks, which - obviously - is superior to paint. It has options similar to Photoshop... but I particularly dislike Photoshop.
Glad you liked the sig, Game.