Honestly, we really might have confused a few people with this one! We wanted to pay tribute to one of our favorite cryptoart OGs - XCOPY – as his SuperRare second market sales record resonated throughout the NFT space this week. On the other hand, the grounded cargo ship in Suez Canal was a significant, even historical world event worth capturing as well. Let's set sail!

My initial idea was very different from the resulting piece. I wanted to illustrate OG XCOPY as a fanatically beloved idol. An adolescent artist, VR painting in his futuristic studio (full of references to XCOPY).

As the weekend progressed we were busy finishing another special Gazette project when Redlion came up with the brilliant idea of depicting the stuck cargo ship on the upcoming cover.  The cargo containers should have iconic "KING Cricket Soup" and "Fly Juice"  brands on them. I drew sketches of 3 possible perspectives. Decidedly, for a 2D illustration, the bird's view would be most suitable (the most iconic too).

Before I could create some XCOPY fakes I had to find and customize Procreate brushes to emulate his work as accurately as possible. Re-drawing XCOPY's soup and juice from scratch was the first test drive of the new brushes. The results were pretty satisfying so I quickly moved onto the ship.

My first thought was to swap containers with giant cans and bottles as the ship's cargo. But still, the animation would need some zooming or scene cuts. I tweaked this concept, depicting the ship itself as floating cricket soup cans and a fly juice bottle. Easy, recognizable, and well suited to create a seamless, looping animation.

You can watch the whole drawing process in the video, complete with endless brush testing! Originally the idea was to leave the ship stuck in the canal and restart the loop using a glitch or zoom transition. Later I realized that releasing the ship with another nudging hand from the opposite side was the smartest way forward. The animation was created in After Effects.

Yet another prophecy by #Cassandra Redlion.news has been fulfilled. On Monday, just after this issue sold out, the stuck ship 'Evergreen' was freed from the Suez canal, despite expert estimates of weeks! 🤯 Apparently a tiny 'Death Push' from XCOPY was all Evergreen needed. Spooky!

We'll certainly be scrutinizing our 'future covers' more carefully than ever...