Aylward Lettering and Design - freelance logo

My project was to create a logo mark for my creative work, to be potentially used on my website and business card. This year I got into lettering and since day one have wanted to use the skill to create a custom logo for my work; this was the perfect opportunity! I chose Aylward because it is my last name and it has always been a challenge for me to letter, time to figure it out. 

Unfortionately I have lost a lot of my warmup, process and pencil rough pages (careless cleaning of studio). So to begin:

After reviewing my pencil sketches and knowing what kind of work I do I decided to go with a very casual oblique style, a sort of refined signature. I played with this composition with a lead in stroke; I liked the idea of it however it wasn't quite working...

So instead I refined it a little bit, got rid of the stroke lead and started to play with letter compostion. 

Once I decided on the compostion and pen I liked I drew it a million times to build up that muscle memory. (these are only about 1/4 of how many I drew and they're all double sided.

Because of the causual style I wanted I went with this drawing to base my vector on, it's not the cleanest but I liked the feel of it and I knew I could vector it clean.

Ugly early vector, spacing all screwy; its got the feel but not the flash; time to get to work. 

Finished vector with textures added. At first I thought I wanted "lettering and design" under the right wing of the main title but it just wasn't working. So after reviewing other projects in the project gallery I picked certain elements from others that could work for me. I'm pretty happy with the end result, there are some transitions and flow improvements I know I could work on but I think I got it to a nice place where it stands:

Thanks for checking out my project, I'm proud to say this has been the first one I have uploaded to skillshare!
I look forward to hearing feedback.
Cheers!