Well if an ape changed your life, then this cover is for you, and if not this cover is for you too! This week’s issue covers the grand hype around the launch and acceptance of $APE. Are you holdling or not?

Last week NFT Twitter was washed with tweets from BAYC owners who had hit an unexpected jackpot with $APE. Naturally-even though- we had featured the apes in our last cover we had to once more, for the culture and history. So there it was an ape cover. But don’t you wanna know what you missed instead? A smoking hot cover featuring Snoop Dogg. Well, we guess it’s not yet time for the Doggfather to make his full-fledged appearance in our Gazette. 

We were at first misinformed as to whether it was a Snoop Dogg cover or anything else. It was quite later that we found out it will not be that but an Ape cover. Immediately we recouped for another brainstorming session with a clean slate. 

Red saved the day with a ready-to-art concept of Uncle Scrooge's paintings by the legendary Carl Barks. After going through several of his paintings and cover we decided this was the way to go. Uncle Scrooge’s vault depicted exactly how Apes felt, and the vault was getting packed every second passing. 

Next came the sketch to replace the characters and add other elements that would make this NFT ready and align with our theme. Uncle Scrooge turned from a Duck to an Ape; the nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie became a Dickbutt, Meebit, and a Coolcat; Donald Duck turned into a tractor driving Crypto Punk; a gold-framed image of prince Vitalik buried in the coins; a jersey of Tom Brady as a prized collection installed on the wall; a mixtape and a short cameo by the man D-O-G-G himself. 

We had it all covered in sketches and set out to finish the artwork. It was quite painstaking as we were trying to recreate an oil painting that was created by the creator of Donald Duck himself, well after his long stint at Disney, cozily in the comfort of his retirement. We were trying to recreate this in less than 48 hours! It was stressful, to say the least, but in the end, it all started to take the form of Uncle Ape, the nephews dumping coins into the vault, a confused punk, so on so forth. The devil is in the details so we had to go there and please the devil. The coins. THE COINS! In the original they are all painted one by one, yes you heard that right. We did not have that luxury at our hands but we still tried our bests to do it justice.

In the end, it all came out pretty well and was worth it all. Though we had some hiccups with the final rendering due to some layer mismanagement we cracked the painting in all its glory and even animated it within the nick of time! Next week we will be back with another cover that’s not hopefully Ape related(we are quite BORED of the apes lol), so until then read and share the Gazette to all-around in your circle!