@borebonn, well done John for your first Inkscape project! This software is very powerful and you can do lots of crazy/amazing/beautiful things with it.
I agree that Inkscape has a certain learning curve, but it’s really worth to spend some time to understand how things work. The tutorials in the help menu are already a very good starting point and the funny thing is that they run within Inkscape itself, so you can alter shapes and fonts and other things just in the tutorial! Have fun with this great piece of open source software.