New Logo!

I spent this morning working on a new personal logo for the site. What do you think? I've never done anything like this before (ie designed a graphic entirely by hand/computer) and I'm really happy with the way it turned out. It went through so many stages. Here are some of it:

First I started off with some sketches in a book by hand. These look pretty similar to the final product actually.

There was one stage that I did first which I deleted. I was informed it looked like she was praying so I dropped the length of the table to give her a longer chest, added a chair, and put the clock in the corner to signify the 'crafting for a spell of time' portion. I created the logo primarily from circles and lines in Macromedia Fireworks. The only problem is Fireworks doesn't let you erase part of circles or lines or shorten them (or else I can't figure out how) so it looked like this before I put it into paint.

 

Here is what she looked like after the erasing was done in paint.

Then I added some color and drew something in her hand. It is up to your imagination what it is but I suppose it could just be some type of pencil or brush. I then toyed with whether to add more stuff on the desk like boxes or something crafty but everything was just looking horrible so I left it plain.

Then I took this old temporary logo I'd made.

You can see the adjustments above on the new logo. I just used a Fireworks filter to play with the hue and saturation. Because of the blues in the picture, I changed the woman's hair color and dress to a different shade and colored in her shoes.

I, personally, love it! But I'd love to hear what you guys think :)