Ok ive seen lots of head textures being displayed on spheres. Now im wondering what progams you guys use, i use GIMP currently and it doesnt map the texture very nicely onto a sphere. It is fuzzy and there is always a transparent seem at the back. So does anyone know of an alternative program which can do this that is also free.

I'm not sure but I think Inkscape may have that feature. (It is free)

You can always use pov-ray rendering. It makes the head stand out.

Here

also if you use GIMP just make your heads in 512^ and make sure the art fills the canvas the line is caused by blank canvas on the sides

Photoshop Cs5 and Cs4 extended have the awesome ability to "map to sphere" so it creates a sphere that has your flat as texture on it. It is really great help in mapping.