I have been on a message board (now defunct, no link) on which challenges were sometimes set and we'd all do our best to impress, and frankly I wasn't a huge fan of the over saturated textures and stuff.  In fact, I won an award for innovative design because I refused to do blends or cutouts and worked only with textured or patterned bases, text placement, and translucent colour blocks.  Unfortunately, an award for innovative design was just that, and I soon discovered that I couldn't actually move ahead in any challenges unless I tried to put some of these other things into practice.  So, here ya go.

Practice Makes Perfect Challenge: This challenge was set to those of us in the first level of design.  We were given set stock images, of which three needed to appear in each of five different banners.  Or something.  I thought I'd done pretty well for a first-timer.  I didn't even place.  :-D

People's Hottest Bachelors Icon Challenge: So the challenge here was to take the photo spread from People's Hottest Bachelors from that year (I don't remember which year this was, maybe it was only last year?), and make icons out of them.  This is my entry, but I uh ended up not actually getting off my duff to enter it.  I have no illusions that I would have won.