This week’s cover is a depiction of the Bear/Bull market runs we’ve been seeing lately. Our faith remains strong that it will be bear for now but bull tomorrow surely.

The idea for the cover came mostly from the fact that it was a slow week in NFTs and Crypto, running up to the much-awaited merge. Since we had covered the long-awaited merge a few issues ago it was time to show up with the bulls and bears. Red suggested that we go with a tug-of-war scenario as it aptly captures the trends of the economy at large. We decided on an illustration style that hadn’t been quite seen for a while now. 

As Dudly is on a honeymoon it was left to me to hold the fort for the week. But, the man is obsessed and won’t leave the fort alone. While I was struggling with the middle part of the artwork he appeared and suggested the 10 commandments to get it right. Once I had the artwork it was time for animation and honestly, I was both terrified and excited about it. Excited because it’s really cool to tackle animations in AE, terrifying because my laptop couldn’t render AT ALL last week.

I decided to break down the animating process between necessary and in Red’s lingo,” glitter”. The necessary parts were the pulling of the rope and the movement of the bear and bull. This was quite a tricky part as I had to do it in sync but also with slight differences as in tug-of-war people aren’t stuck to the rope. When I felt I had that covered, I next went on to animate the movement of the clouds and flames. Next was the candle bar movement. Then some turbulent gradients, distorted warps and radial blurs laters (excited to dump these newly acquired terms here) the cover was ready, ready for the final touch of audio. After that, I was all prepared for mint with my newly acquired hacker skills, and the Gazette finally was launched by Red into the moon(ETA few years).

We’ll be back next week frens as the merge inches closer, with another killer cover! See y’all next week:)