If you just want to get stuck right in there, I found the following technique immensely useful when I first got into designing graphics, logos and buttons etc. I recommend you give it a go. Photograph it, mess with it and scan it
You'd be surprised what you can do using real world objects and turning them into virtual abstracts. One image I required recently was a hand on a mouse. Armed with digital camera I took a pic of my own hand on a mouse. Port that into Photoshop and increase brightness and contrast to a point where it's faint but you can still see the outline.
Then print it out, and trace the outline with a black pen.
Scan the printed and traced outline into Illustrator and convert it into a vector using whatever smoothing elements you need to give you a professional image.
Same effect can be had by tracing real world objects on a pen tablet of course, but sometimes the colours/shading in a photo scan can actually fluke you some interesting imagery which you end up not tracing or vectorising.
Because I'm not a natural artist (meaning I can't actually draw very well) I find using real world objects in this way, then tracing and scanning them, coupled to a good grounding knowledge of the software applications needed, gets me an extremely professional looking end result for line drawings, basic logos/imagery and buttons. Mostly now I just do this because I enjoy it. 80% of my artwork is now outsourced. I can do just as good a job but it takes me longer and discipline requires that I'm more cost effective spending my time doing what I'm better at. That's a whole other subject though.
Here's another one that turned out great when I did it - try scanning a 3D object on a flatbed scanner leaving the lid up (off) when it scans.
Import to Photoshop and then "invert" it.
A little creativity goes a long way in making up for a lack of artistic pen and paper technique.
__________________
"A hedge between keeps friendship green" 
|