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Arianna Morese
The purpose of the Ray Gun magazine project was to pick a music artist of choice and use them as a basis to create our own unofficial issues of the 90s Ray Gun magazine. This project was all about breaking conventions and design rules, from illegible text to words sprawling off the page. It was more about making a statement than making sense. Due to its origins with its art director David Carson and his past with surfing and the surf subculture, I chose the rockabilly surf rock band Stray Cats. It was also a fitting choice considering the Ray Gun magazines are almost always grungy, gritty, and dirty, much like the Stray Cats themselves.
Cover page
Top left: Cover page sketch
Top right: Intro spread sketch
Bottom left: Back page sketch
Bottom right: Cover page "Stray Cats" lettering progress
Creative Process
When choosing a music artist, I kept in mind the grungy style of the Ray Gun magazines and its art director David Carson’s history with surf, and as such chose the rockabilly band Stray Cats. This project was meant to be creative and wild, so I was not bound by a certain program or medium to create with. To start my ideation, I made a few main sketches since a large portion of mine was yet to be illustrated. The cover page had the most time spent on its sketch since it would be later recreated in modeling clay and therefore I wanted a very clear image of what I was doing. The introductory spread and back cover were both illustrations, so their rough sketches were quick and simple just to jog ideas down. For the final product, I started with and spent the most time and effort on the cover page as I felt it was the most impactful and interesting aspect of my individual project. Due to spending all this time, I had no opportunities to create variations of the pages, but I felt confident enough in my work that I did not see any issues with this. As Ray Gun is meant to be messy, much time was saved on leaving mistakes that otherwise might have had to be fixed on any other project.
Tools & Elements of Design
Using pen, pencil, colored pencil and paper, all my sketches and final illustrations were drawn traditionally on paper. For my introductory spread, I had torn off a chunk of the paper with my drawing on it and taped to the back of it a quote by Stray Cats lead Brian Setzer. However, due to the color paper being the same for both, I used digital program Paint Tool Sai to color the paper with the quote a more aged, brownish color with some drawn-in wrinkles and such as well. When creating the Ray Gun logo and cat mascot in modeling clay, I created the Stray Cats logo in cardboard hand-painted red, which then had yellow clay dots added to them to make them appear like antique light-up signs. Fishing line was used as a final touch for the clay cat’s whiskers. For the article spread, a printed map of the United States was torn apart and taped together, and four fake Polaroid photos of the band were printed out and strung together with brown string. Without, for the most part, being bound by the principles of design, I was able to create a project with unusually aligned text, nonsense wording, clashing fonts, etc. By the end of the project, I had used modeling clay, paper, cardboard, ballpoint pen, pencil, colored pencil, string, printouts, and even fishing line. Once the project was finished, each page was printed out and later created into a booklet.
Top: Opening spread
Bottom: Secondary spread
Cover page (perspective shot)
Back page illustration
Performance Evaluation
Despite not everything in my project being illustrated though a lot of it was, I felt that I learned the value of sketching things out even if they are not going to be illustrations. This is because when doing my meticulous sketching for the clay cover page, I wanted to make sure I could get an understanding of the look and feel of my final cover page rather than jumping right into the final stages. I feel this helped me to create a much better end product that was much closer to my intentions thanks to the sketches. As I often find I improve the fastest when I step out of my comfort zone and experiment, and due to not having done a project of this kind before, the experience I gained from doing so is invaluable to me. Though I am not entirely unfamiliar with clay sculpting as I did it rather often many years ago, it was a goal of mine to get back into doing it and keep improving on my skills in the craft, which I felt this project helped me to achieve.
Printouts 1
Printouts 2