Issue 58 is inspired by the rocketing of our favorites BTC & ETH to their respective all-time highs, and other events that grabbed our attention over the week.

We had decided the theme when the events were taking place in full swing. As always the question “What will be the concept?” came next. Given the other events that took place regarding the NFT games, we decided it would be fitting to show the entire major event with a hint of games in it. That’s how we finalized the concept of showing a card with two kings: BTC’s Satoshi Nakamoto and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin.

Next on the table was Red’s advice to try a tattoo-style artwork. We are constantly pushing our boundaries here at Redlion in everything we do. Styles obviously take years to be mastered. We were looking at artists like Ed Hardy whose history in tattoo art spans decades. Yet, we tried our best to do justice to the craft of tattoo art. 

The first sketch (shown below) was us throwing ideas to incorporate the articles but keeping the style strong with a message. Once the sketch was confirmed I took to inking the outlines. Finding a suitable brush to emulate the right brush was quite difficult but in the end, I think we were happy with the choice.

Painting the tattoo sketch was where I had to choose between a clean Western-style tattoo or a Japanese-style tattoo that leaned more towards a painterly style. Ed Hardy being the inspiration it was only appropriate to try the latter. Though it was very difficult at first, things got better as I got comfortable with the brushes.

And so, the cover was ready.

We had covered (starting from the top going clockwise) the Genesis of BTC in 2008; Discord Webhook Attacks; Papa John’s pizzas bought with 10k BTC, which was $40 worth at the time; a tiger depicting the booming crypto economy; a butterfly splitting into two showing the split of ETH into ETH and ETH Classic, and one catching fire (you can guess which one); Dragon depicting the dragon economies of Asia emerging in the crypto sphere; Meka skull decaying beautifully; screaming monster with the Tesla logo on its tongue to show the infamous tweets of Elon Musk that affects the BTC market.

All in all, we had a blast working on this week’s cover which also has the rare ‘King’ trait to it, and in fact, it is twice as much rare with two kings being featured. 

Dudly ran the artwork through a relatively less turbulent clean-up session as compared to last week’s “layer apocalypse” and started animating. During almost the 7 hour screen-share he walked me through the tedious and fun BTS of animating a cover from start to finish. How it was possible to single-handedly handle all of it still goes over my head, especially when it’s 4 am and I can hear the birds.

We continue to take it all to the next level with all of our readers’ love and support. On that note, have a great week frens! See y’all next week with a spooky Halloween cover!