Our first underwater cover. On this one, we tried to be ''edgy''. It was directly tied to the main story of the week which were the NG guidelines. For this nautic theme, I choose to go with a kind of Jules Vern aesthetics.

The poor Flipper is assassinated by a scummy diver coming out of the whale's mouth. This brutal scene is hiding so much symbolism and references.

The diver for instance is equipped beside his deadly harpoon with a toothbrush he has just used to serve the whale's needs.

Technically the artwork is a collage made from many reference pictures that were retraced, edited, and mixed to create this violet mood. Animations are done as always in After Effect with underwater warp distortion as a final touch.

A week where we tried to be 'edgy'. It was directly tied to the main story of the week which were the NG guidelines.

Death to Flippers

Issue #17 was published on Sunday January 10th 2021, which was the 1st week of 2021.

Due to an interesting anomaly within the ISO calendar as opposed to the Gregorian calendar, every 5-6 years there is a 53 week year. As it turns out 2020 had 53 weeks. The cover was created by then new and fresh artist Dudly who was in only his second month with Redlion. 

For those of you who have been following us, back then the team was composed solely of Dudly and Redlioneye – the latter of which you might notice created all of the articles during this period in our history – very different times compared to now.
The topic of discussion in issue #17 were the very strict guidelines that Nifty Gateway introduced, especially against flippers. In response to this, we depicted this situation as an underwater Julius Vern scene where the flipper (get it?) gets harpooned by a  diver coming out of a whale’s mouth.
 
We also saw Polyent Games trying to break the NFT sales record by investing into a project through buying an NFT for 800k USD. This sale was slightly more than Beeple’s record breaking offload of “The Complete MF Collection”, which sold for ($777,777.77), that being the number to beat at the time. Our Shameless Shilling section was focused on Cryptopunks and was written by Gmoney, a collector who had recently purchased an Ape Cryptopunk for a  whooping 140 ETH (approx $140k at the time). 

Looking back it’s easy to see that the Gazette was still in a very early stage along with the NFT space as a whole! There is an incredible contrast between the first entry into the year and the last – both in terms of the Gazette’s quality and growth in the NFT space!

The ArtDrop for issue #17 was “Machine Head” by the artist Glitch Black, who meddles with Cyberpunk inspired music & visuals.




Winston Wolf of web3 art & design + anything else. I solve problems.

#17

Death to Flippers

Cover Story

Death to Flippers

Cover Traits

Mixed

Rarity

11.56%

Limited

Rarity

31.79%

Maritime

Rarity

2.89%

Stylized

Rarity

21.97%

No

Rarity

34.10%

No

Rarity

48.55%

No

Rarity

89.02%

No

Rarity

64.16%