An exercise to learn more of photoshop

For a Name fest, Arif and I prepared a logo on a Photoshop. Name fest is a competition where we had to think of a name and prepare a logo that describes that name. This was a good exercise to practice Photoshop as now after making a logo, we are more familiar with its elements and can innovate using different applications. Arif came with the word 'sense of Aesthetics ' and we felt it can be quite challenging and interesting to reflect it in a logo. We planned on using as little elements as possible as we did not want to overcrowd the logo and also make to look understandable. The elements were collected from google and after cutting and pasting, we made a diagram as it is in the right. 

Now after making a rough form, we had to change its appearance and make it look more real and elegant. The straight paper was transformed and it was made to look like it is kept on a desk from a persons perspective. To make it look more realistic, drop shadow effect was given from the blending options. After making the slight adjustments on the positioning of the elements, we desaturated the diagram and changed the hue to give it an ancient look. From the filters, brush strokes were used on all the elements.To add more realism, we made duplicate layer of quill and ink and with the gradient tool, filled the shape with black color gradually lightening from right to left, than rotated and changed their shapes to make them look like shadows. The text written was in white color and emboss and drop shadow was used from the blending options for the text to give it a 3D effect. Using a black pencil tool we made a small line emerging out of the quill tip to make it look like a pen mark.To make it look more cultured and sophisticated we added the translation of the word in Urdu and similar effects from the blending effects were used for it.. Our final product looks like this: