I had the honour of being asked to do the inside cover illustration for the extremely well renowned magazine Computer Arts. Having been in their magazines since 2008, writing articles, doing interviews and tutorials, this was by for the biggest piece I have worked with them on and a big one to tick off the list. 

Initially I sent over some rough sketches to show the way in which I would approach the piece which were quickly signed off, then I sent over a wireframe version to show how the piece would work in vector, followed by a list of highlights and colour variations before we decided on the final version. 

I spent a fair amount of time sketching up different patterns and routes before we settled on this. The brief was extremely open so my idea was to create a single focal point and build the illustration around that. I chose a fairground as the style point. 

As with every Design Matters illustration, one of the only must haves from Computer Arts is to have the Design Matters logo in the centre of the piece, so in wanting to build that into the illustration, I drew up a fairground striker to encompass the logo. This also worked as the device I could build the rest of the illustration around. 

I then built the initial illustration around the focal point
and was able to start developing elements further

With the initial sketches signed off, I started to develop a range of fairground
illustrations to go in the different compartments I had been creating.
Experimenting with colour and detail. 

From this point I added to my initial sketch to pad and fill out the piece. 

Next I moved everything to the vector stage to give the client a better
understanding as to where I was heading with the work. 

Once we had the basic layout sorted, it was time to go through a range of
colourways to see what would be most effective for this instance. 

I then applied the experimentations to the full piece and moved further
into exploration before the final was decided on. 

Here is the final version with cut out highlighted sections

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