Suijin Logo

The next logo I completed from sketches was 'Suijin Games'.

Here is the first version I made.

With this version I stuck quite closely to the original shape and design. I stuck mainly to blue, being a watery colour, and made some background shapes in 'silver' and turquoise, which are auxiliary colours. I liked the wave at the end of the character's 'tail' so much that I made the separate extra waves to try and bring it out a little. I also used a contrast of inner and drop shadows to create a contrast of embos and engraving. I added a similar effect to the font, which I really liked.
The font I used was Endor from www.fantasyfonts.com.

Overall I think the logo worked out alright, and would definitely say I preferred it over the Agrona logo. But with so much attention on the wave of the tail, I wanted to try making a simpler logo with just the wave as an image. Here is the first alternate I made.

I took out the bottom-most layer with the turquoise-black wave shadow and changed the font (mainly). The new font is called Fairydust, also from www.fantasyfonts.com. I also made an effort to separate out the two words of the logo. I really like the effect made by making the first word dark and the second light, with the wave as a background. I felt that this somehow worked a lot better than the first version, but I felt like there was a little something missing and I could make it even better, so I added a few tweaks. Below is what I came up with.

I was happiest with this version. I didn't change the font this time, but I removed the 'tails' of the waves with a layer mask and added the dark blue and white 'swivel' underlining the word 'Suijin'. I feel that this made the overall image more compact and focused, with just the right amount of interest on both words.