Thanks for the tips. When I said copying another image, I meant more of, say finding a generic picture of an apple and dropping all color then refilling it with your chosen color more than taking someone else's logo and coloring it up.
I had a very basic but probably stupid question. When you are doing your logos do you sketch it out by hand and then do lineart to fill it in, find an existing image and remove the colors then restore to make it your own or draw it out in your program? Thanks in advance for your help.