The story below is from our January/February 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
As we celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2024, we’ve asked local artists to interpret new creations of past covers. Our inaugural recreation spotlights the incredible talent of our art director, Ana Morales.
See the time lapse of Ana's Roanoker 50th anniversary cover recreation—nearly 10 hours condensed into a minute and 25 seconds!
The Roanoker’s Jan/Feb 1976 issue included a look at Roanoke’s top industries, the fortunes of coal miners and Roanoke’s best dressed men.
Which iconic Roanoker cover did you choose and why?
I chose the January/February cover from 1976 because the composition and color palette caught my eye, but also because I immediately had an idea of how I could recreate it.
From an aesthetic point of view, I love the contrast of the red masthead against the blues as well as the juxtaposition of these four somewhat out-of-place figures in front of the train. As a lifelong Roanoker, trains have always been a presence in my life—I remember hearing them in the distance in my childhood home and sitting in my car waiting for them to pass when I worked downtown for many years.
Describe the process of recreating this cover and how you chose to interpret it.
The cover story for this issue was about Roanoke’s top industries in 1976 so I wanted to have my version show some of the top industries in Roanoke today. The top employer is Carilion Clinic, followed by Wells Fargo Bank, HCA Health System, Kroger, Walmart and UPS.
Ana Morales
Morales created her Roanoker cover art digitally, building up the drawing in several layers.
I learned from Mason Adams in his Jan/Feb 2023 Roanoker article “A Skyline to Remember” that Carilion chose green tinted glass for the windows on Roanoke Memorial Hospital so that it would reflect the movement and progress in Roanoke. Instead of reflecting the present, I decided to create a digital illustration of Roanoke Memorial with a reflection of the train from the 1976 Roanoker cover.
I searched for photos of Roanoke Memorial until I found one that kind of matched the composition of the train photo on the Roanoker cover—they’re surprisingly similar in shape from certain angles. Even the colors were similar!
Since I was working digitally, I built the illustration in layers, going back and forth between my references in order to merge the two primary images. In place of the four men that graced the original cover, I drew three people that represent some of today’s top industries, including a doctor, banker and grocer.
Ana Morales is a mixed-media artist based in Roanoke. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from James Madison University, where she studied studio art and art education.
Find her work online at amoralesart.com or follow her over on Instagram @anamoralesart.
The story above is from our January/February 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!