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Back in the day if you needed to inform the immediate local community that you liked hip-hop or rap music, you’d wonder about the ’hood encumbered with a fat-battery-eating boombox or ‘ghettoblaster’ on your shoulder blasting out whatever rhymes you deemed had utmost flow, leaving your involuntary audience without any shade of doubt, (and in no way agitated at such an ostentatious display.)

Here I’ve taken the phrase ‘Ghettoblaster’ and redefined it as a shotgun. I avoided the trap of adding knobs and dials, and instead focused on the Ghetto connotations - Graffiti. I filled up a few A3 pages sketching the word out and tried to come up with a style that worked in the space. On the scale between readable and unreadable I've opted for the former so people can get the idea more clearly. I narrowly avoided adding John Cusack's hands to the T stems.

As ghettos are economically deprived places of extreme urban decay, I’ve mashed up the alpha map, adding a chipped paint effect through subtle variance in tone - check out the forestock wear over time. The magazine tube wears the most as it receives the most movement. Somewhere between Minimal wear and field tested looks best -- factory new looks perhaps too clean, but I've seen people whinge on reddit when a gun skin is not pristine at factory new. Also note no matter how much wear is applied the main graffiti remains mostly intact -- I don't like punishing those with battle scarred iterations but at the same time have mashed up the rest of the gun.

I’ve adorned the rear and spine with little funky details. The reverse side features a funky dude carrying a boombox - it started off as a very loose and intentionally-vague nod to a randomly picked dev I saw in a photo on HLTV, for relevence I've shifted it heavily towards Run-DMC, but also Heisenberg - (I'm really into breaking bad at the moment). Other prominent features are ‘Pump it up’ and ‘Taste my bass’. I also drew a blinged up chicken B-boying on a cardboard mat that was originally intended to sit below the guy, but there wasn’t enough room for it to be at a legible size so it got cut early on.

A nice touch that I couldn't get to work was the shotgun shells. My plan was to have chunky batteries being loaded and popping out instead! A shell does appear in the UV but it must source the real texture somewhere else. :(

I’ve made two options, both are pretty loud. It was originally designed in primary colours, but I was worried about the vibrancy of the blue so I made a second brown option - which looks much more harmonious.

I struggled with names to differentiate the two. ‘Blue magic’ came to me while I was developing it, I was listening to ‘White lines’ by Grandmaster flash and the drug reference seemed to fit. For the brown option I’ve named it ‘Umber dub’ - as it was a remix of the blue version, and I love the word dub; it actually came to me while listening to ‘dub be good to me’ by beat international. Alternate names were ‘brown-brown’ (another drug reference) or ‘smoked umber’ - which I found amusing as every crayon or paint set is guaranteed to have a brown called burnt umber. Smoked umber seemed a humorous way to allude to both drugs and a lighter brown -- too tenuous and weak I guessed so played it safe.

Anyway let me know which option you like.

Bonus spotify playlist[open.spotify.com] I was listening to during the making of this.