Alabama Logo Concept

[bigmike]

Hey guys, I took a little break from my NCAA Football Series (which was somewhat rebooted recently, I'll start working on it again sometime) and created this logo for the NCAA Concept Championship. I got put out in the first round by JJSCOTT whose work is absolutely fantastic. Anyways, I would have liked to rework my logo before I entered it into the tournament but I didn't really have time. I am extremely new to inkscape and it is completely out of my comfort zone (MS paint & GIMP are my "tools of the trade"). I've watched some of gbm's videos and while they are great, I can't really seem to figure out how to rework my logo using his tutorials. So I figured I would post my logo, show you guys how far I got using drawing skills, MS Paint and GIMP. And then see if everyone could give my pointers on how to improve it in inkscape, I really need a lot of pointers because I really have no understanding of the program yet. I would love to be able to create logos like this more often though, I love to draw and if I could translate that to computer I would even like to try and make a career out of it or at least keep it around as a hobby.

Moving on to the logos, I'll go ahead and explain the inspiration behind this. The old school Alabama logo features a block A and a Elephant inside it, they sort of rebranded the logo in 2002. I don't have a problem with the 2002 one, in fact I think it is very underrated, but living in Alabama and being around the merchandise all the time, that logo is not used very much and I've always liked the script A logo better. I also prefer the Old School logo over the 2002 version, I even have a sweatshirt with the old one on it. So I decided to update it and using the script A. The elephant in the new one is supposed to look somewhat cartoony but I know it needs a lot of work on the face, and I definitely need to work on shadowing/highlights but I really could use some pointers on how to do everything in inkscape to fix it up.

Here is the original drawing of the logo

...and here is the painterized version of it.

I also did a comparison of it and the old school logo side by side.

I know everyone here is more then capable of helping me improve this so I hope you guys can help me out, hopefully I can rework it and incorporate it in a University Rebrand type concept later.

[neo_prankster]

That elephant seems to be losing air to that big cursive A.

[Hontas]

He looks like his head is stuck in the A and is angry about it.