My First Graphic

I'm taking a college course on programming, web design and graphics, for the graphics unit for the assignment which will take about 2 years we will be creating a 2D Game and then possiblly making it 3D.
The first step we need to do is design a main antaganist (alien by teacher's request) 3 lvls of weapon, 3 evnironment backgrounds, 3 enemy mob types, and a boss; aswell as powerups, health packs ect.

I started on the weapon as I dunno, felt easiest to start will for me.
I have never used photoshop or fireworks before, I have only pissed about on paint, I do have adobe master suite... but never really tried learning any of the programs.

Well heres my wep so far, this is about half a days work, plus learning the program,  the program we are using is called Inkscape, its free and very simple.

Well here it is:

You can tell what 2 weapons I made it from, so far I have only focused on the main body, the shoulder part and the grip I havn't touched since I sketched them quickly to give me an idea of the overall look of it.