Sparkbright magazine

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I run and edit an online magazine. We are currently preparing our sixth issue, which will be due out at the start of June. There are two of us on the editorial staff - me, and my friend Ami, who lives in the States and who I met online a few years ago now. Obviously we're working in different time zones, which makes communication quite difficult, and I hadn't heard from her for a few months. So the majority of this issue has been done by me. By which I mean most of the accepted submissions have been my decision - just me. I'm a little nervous about that, if I'm honest, but it's also quite exciting to know that I'm responsible for 90% of this issue so far.

I've also put together some prospective cover art - I always find it difficult to find suitable artwork, so I got myself a free trial of Photoshop and decided to have a go at it myself. I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out - as it's our summer issue, I wanted something quite bright. And as we don't have any set themes for the content we use, it's always difficult to choose a particular subject or object to focus on for the cover art. So I went for something more abstract... I like it, and I hope other people do too. I haven't worked with Photoshop for a good few years (since our home computer broke and I started university), so it took quite a few attempts before I ended up with something I was happy with.

I might make a couple of other possible versions before my trial runs out - it's always handy to have some cover art available for if it gets to the week before the new issue's due out and I realise we haven't got any artwork sorted!

If anyone's got any comments or suggestions as to how I could improve it, or if you like it, please let me know! I'm open to all feedback, and would love to hear from you.

Artwork © Emily Smith, 2011. Cover art is to be used by Sparkbright magazine, June 2011.