Laid out the lettering and then "skewed" the top lettering to the right and the bottom lettering to the left. This helps give the impression that the banner is curved out. Applied the same surface texture settings to the letters that I had to the banner.

I then reduced the whole image down by 50%. Applied some "sharpening" to the image and recolored the background to an off-white.

The next step was to make the propeller blades slightly transparent.

I then saved the image as a GIF with the off-white background. The off-white colored background was chosen so that later when the background was made transparent the rest of the colors would not be affected. It was also necessary to choose a light transparent color because the image would be used on a light colored background.

If the transparent color is not close to the background color that the transparent GIF is going to be used on, then a halo around the image is noticeable.