pencil drawing to something nice/professional

I am looking for help and suggestions on where to start in an attempt to convert a pencil drawing to something more professional.

I am donating my time to re-work a site for a breast cancer org (great group of people but the site needs help) I can do the design work on the site no problem but I want to start with a nicer logo.

They drew out the logo and scanned it in literally a pencil sketch, you can see they tried to make the logo a J and C tied together into a ribbon sort of.

I want to take that to the next level, I do have photoshop 6.0 but mainly use it for photo enhancement and have taken some classes on basic use but nothing like what I am trying to tackle here.

Here is the logo


Here are the things I am wanting to do to it, let me know if it is even possible and or where to start.I want to say thank you in advance for any help on this, I won't go into deep details but this is a non profit org that helps women who have breast cancer pay medical bills and offers support in many other ways too. So I appreciate any and all help on this.


I want to make the background that is currently pinkish (behind the logo) to CLEAR

I want to keep the essential shape / design but trim edges and even it up just a bit to make it more uniform and sleeker and I want to stay with the same basic colorings of the logo but I want it to look smooth shiny refined silky professional vs a pencil sketch.

Lastly I will add the same text and I have fiddled with text enough to get some decent shadowing and such going, but I want the text and logo to be seperate (clear area) but all within one logo if that makes sense?

I know to make part of the image clear I need to outline the main image and copy that into a new window and make that a transparent gif as a starting point, but before i add text and save it as a gif in transparent mode the big question is how can I really snazz up that image to retain the basic shape and colors yet really polish it up to look professional.

If anyone can help on this with suggestions or a few mins of time please let me know I would greatly appreciate it as well as the organization would appreciate it too.

Bill

First off let me start off by saying welcome to Teamphotoshop!!!

Photoshop is not the best program for logos. Illustrator in all its sweet sweet vectorness is much better suited. However free is free so while photoshop isn't really the best choice it can be done.

Sketch it out
Unless your going to keep the logo 'as is' work outside of photoshop to do a final sketch on what you want. It sounds like you don't use photoshop for more then photo editing anyways so it may be best to settle on what you want it to look like exactly.

Scan it in
Once you have your final sketch done scan it in. Some artist ink their drawings pre-photoshop but if you feel like learning the pen-tool you can do it after you've imported the sketch into photoshop.

Re-create
If your really new you many want to skip the pen-tool, but it really is the best solution and i suggest learning it at some point. If just going over it with a paint tool is easier then go for it.

Basically i'm suggesting you re-create it all in photoshop opposed to trying to improve the current image. Once you have the basic shape perhaps you could come back and ask how to do certain effects.

You could just to make the basic selection and just 'paint' over the image in a new layer if you don't feel like resketching it.