Well I am a graphics designer blah blahj frelance and the best way is to start with a thumbnail on paper and pen. If you good enough you wont even need to use the computer other then scanning the image.
About editing the image ( if you need to ) you will need Coreldraw. Then to put everything together you again use Coreldraw( paint ), and then Quark....just slide into a College with nice fresh new PC instead of buying a new one..........

or be like me and dumpster dive for a Imac that somebody thought was a broken monitor.
There is other things you can do with the image but the main thing is that you need to remove the background of the image and then put your logo over examples.
In terms of studies just ask your freindly lexicon I mean professor...in etc field.