The long journey towards the complete Merge continues, as we all keeps our hopes and ETH hodled. How will it all turn out to be– good or bad? Nevertheless, the journey will be worth it.

Unfortunately, for the past two weeks we have not been able to publish articles as we are doing some organizational restructuring within the writers’ department. And also since it was a slow week it was left to us to decide what to cover for the week. Expanding on the news that Ethereum’s Shadow Fork 9 went live we decided to depict the long journey towards the merge.

To create the concept art we decided to try out Midjourney. “MidJourney is a new art-making tool in closed beta. Though both mysterious and obvious—the output suggests AI-powered generative networks trained to perform style transfer—the resulting art is breathtaking.” 

But how well did it do to create a Moebius-style concept art? Pretty good we must say. Dudly created several images using various prompts and we had a pool of cool sketches to work from. The prompts were to show a long pilgrimage towards an Ethereum crystal shrine in Moebius- style. Once we had the rough sketch ready we set out to try different palettes and after a little tweaking, we settled with the one you see now. These minimal landscapes are quite tricky is what I felt. 

Further, after the artwork was finished Dudly did a few more adjustments to bring together the elements in the artwork. The animation we decided should be kept minimalistic, and that’s what we did with the parallax effect, the little campfires burning in the distance, and the pilgrims down below traveling towards the shrine. 

In the end, we were quite happy with the results, and we hope Moebius is too looking down upon Gazette 96’s cover. We will be back again next week frens, with a killer cover and of course dope articles!