Great place to start learning GFX?

So i downloaded photoshop the day before yesterday, and i have enjoyed playing with it. I have almost zero photoshop skill (the only things i have made this far have been a meh facebook cover, and an attempted sig for this site).

Wanting to learn how to create cool avatars/logo's/ect. I can think up cool logo's in my head, but i have no idea how to translate that into images (stuff like adding shadows, effects, and whatnot).

As far as my epic skills go, i made this



It was going good until i tried to add lightning to it, then it just went to hell, lol. By the time i realized it was a bad idea, i had already done enough clicks so that i couldn't undo it all. (I know, i should have made a new layer for the lightning effects. Or maybe i did, and i was so ticked off at myself that i made such a terrible monstrosity that i forgot about it, lol).

Plus i kinda got the color wrong I still had the background color for my avatar saved, and didn't realize the avatar section and the posting section use totally different colors.

 

http://www.sigtutorials.com/ teaches you how to make sigs and get nice effects

As for getting the background colours mixed up, you should just leave the background transparent so it will work anywhere

 

Thanks. I could of swore i did that with my avatar. And sythe auto added a white background, and youtube auto added a black background, lol.

I may have saved it wrong or something.

 

They don't come up transparent because the size of the avatar itself is different then the upload size, If you try to upload an avatar over 80x80 pixels it doesn't show up transparent even if you have saved it as a .png

Also If you're looking to get into making logos Adobe Illustrator is a great program for making those.

If you want to start making traditional tags/Photo Manips Bakaarts on YouTube is great for tutorials for Beginners-Intermediate designers.

http://www.youtube.com/user/bakaarts

If you need any further help, I could help you out just shoot me a PM.