In my mind's eye I visualised an MP7 with blackletter in an arc toward the rear of the weapon to follow the rotational motion of the reload animation. I primarily associate blackletter with horror, so I decided to take it in that general direction.

I’ve also been listening to Black star by Bowie recently so I decided to allude to the occult but without using crucifixes or actual demon seals, as to be honest - I don’t want to pull at that thread. I really don't like horror at all; after thirty years I’m still scarred by that episode of the Waltons with the poltergeist in... to quote Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force ‘a good man knows his limitations’. So I kept the symbols generic whilst bordering on esoteric. The star on the other hand is such a basic and universal symbol I couldn’t avoid it. The other symbols are doodles I made up trying to mimic alchemic scrawl.

I did some research: Goethe’s Faust, Aleister Crowley, Ars Goetia, Urbain Grandier. There was something appealing about summoning a demon in a faustian pact in order to achieve victory, which I felt was in a similar vein to the mindset of an eco-buy, but instead of praying to Gaben I choose Eligos - a duke of hell who according to wikipedia ‘knows the future of wars and how soldiers should meet’ - a good match for CS. Being a seer of the future prompted ‘all seeing eyes’ featuring on various facets. The backwards type is a direct reference to the aforementioned Grandier’s pact.[en.wikipedia.org] There’s also a not-so-subtle Kubrick reference just for giggles.

Originally I worked it up in 4 separate colour plates to use a Hydrographic or anodised multicoloured finish: Hydrographic has access to the mag but no exponent effect, Anodised multicoloured has the reverse attributes; the other two are tri-planar with little control of how they merge resulting in overlaps or weird projection artefacts… the process always ends up like rummaging through your sock draw and not finding a matching pair, hence I always end up falling back on gunsmith or custom.

Due to the subject matter this is the most uneasy submission I’ve made to date, I’ve always associated the occult with dark and evil mythology; but then again ‘one man's cult is another man's religion’. Visually I’m happy with it. Let me know what you think.