This week’s cover is a tribute to the legendary artist Kim Jung Gi who unexpectedly passed away earlier last week. This departure leaves the art world in great sorrow as he was one of the most influential artists of his time. We send our condolences to his family.

The news of his passing came as a shock to me. I had just informed my gf who had asked me earlier in the day who was the artist I like and who draws tigers a lot. A few hours later I find that artists have posted about this unexpected demise on social media. A complete shock for me as I’ve never looked up to an artist so much as I’ve to Kim Jung Gi, a true master in flesh. 

We decided early on that the cover would be definitely a tribute to the master. The week was otherwise slow for crypto and NFTs so there weren’t many big events we were handling. Since the bear market continues to linger around we decided we could use that; Elon’s revival of the Twitter deal; Red wondering whether to tweet GMs; Jack Dorsey's surprise by the 250 USD price that his Tweet NFT was auctioning for; CZ Binance as a tick; and finally Kim on a throne of clouds watching everything over. We also have featured our friendly mascot Bahdoon buying art from a vendor and asking if it is real. This is in reference to the event earlier last week when we bought artwork from an imposter who shilled on our spaces. Thankfully the fraudulent activity came to light and his account has been suspended from OS.

We took these ideas and decided to depict it all as a surreal sketchbook drawing that Jung Gi is famous for. The most important part was to get the brush thickness and strokes right as it should have the feeling of going at it without an underlying sketch and working straight with an ink pen. Once I had the brush figured out we went ahead and filled in the page as possibly close to the way Jung Gi would have done it, with my limited experience. I had around 25 tabs open of his various sketchbook drawings, thinking I’d be able to get some poses that were difficult-sourced from it. But to my surprise other than the face of the tiger, the pose of Red lying on the floor, and the baby face I never really had to look for references. Honestly, it was quite a surprise I could do it in this style.

It felt like all these last few years of drawing finally helped me pay tribute in a way Jung Gi can be proud of what he has left behind in this world. Animation wise we kept it subtle and quaint with respect to the subjects. Another fun fact is that the music used for this cover was sourced from the same track that we had used for Gazette 39 featuring Silly Tuna. 

We hope you loved this humble tribute to the master. We’ll be back next week with another cover and another story!