The Shangai upgrade occurred right after the eventful NYC week. That my friends is an excellent week to cover, with the bullish signs, oh it's all green and gucci.

At the time of brainstorming for the cover concept Dudly and Red were still in transit. We settled on using the oriental Asian painting style to depict the Shanghai upgrade which went super smoothly. The concept was to show the different upgrades of Ethereum since the Beacon Upgrade in 2021, and finally, the Shanghai upgrade which shows Vitalik Buterin releasing eth crystals into the ether.

Thanks to the extensive archives of these paintings available on the internet from the periods of the 1700s it was pretty easy to accumulate assets that could be adapted into the scenario. Once I had the basic references of the different characters I started to fit them into the narrative.

The tricky part was to create the textured feel of these paintings, which was a lot of trial and error and combinations of different textures, patterns and gradients. But ultimately I was able to hit the sweet spot and execute it creatively.

This week we published a day late to accommodate the sales of the iconic Gazette issue 134 which was created live during the NFT NYC event. Looking forward to more such glorious weeks in NFTs and Crypto!