The Young Americans for Liberty publish a magazine titled “Young American Revolution”. For their March issue, they asked me to create a cover illustration for an article titled “More than Just Nope” about the hard road ahead for limited government, and the dilemma facing the Republican party. They wanted a fork in a road with one direction heading towards debt and destruction, while the other road headed towards peace and prosperity. Armed with this information, I sketched out a couple different thumbnail options.

The client liked the second option best, feeling that it put the subject more front-and-center. Since the sketch was fairly small, it needed to be redrawn.

I made some minor adjustments from the original thumbnail, like widening the fork in the road, and moving the signs from behind the guy to his left and right. I was really unhappy with the guy I had drawn for a number of reasons (help, I’m falling over), so I decided to completely redraw him by modeling him after the organizations Executive Director. Several of the elements, like the buzzard and tank, were drawn separately and added in later.

I brought each of these sketches into Illustrator and began to create the final cover (below).

Here’s a look with mast head and article titles in place:

And here’s a look at the final printed magazine: