I think this Cryptomatic poster design is my favorite of all the stuff I’ve done this year. It features a water dragon dancing inside an exploded view of their famous Bitcoin Envoy watch, and blends two of my favorite things: my unhealthy fascination with drawing complicated machines, and my love of graceful organics.
My drawing app, Procreate, tells me I spent over 16.5 hours on this illustration, and you see every minute of that in the frame, pun intended. The concept for the piece came pretty quickly, as I knew that I needed to feature the Envoy watch prominently, but in a way that was uniquely Cryptopop.
At the time, I was illustrating a lot of dragons (Ignite the Fire, Burning Down the $4000 Wall, as well as in some private commissions), and since Cryptomatic is a HK-based company it seemed like a fine idea to use a colorful dragon to contrast with the mostly monotone timepiece. Originally, I thought of just having a dragon circling around the front watch face, but after sketching it out it seemed too flat and not very exciting.
With complicated pieces like this I try to block out all the major areas first, because the layout has to work with or without details. This was the original draft I presented Luis Rosende, the CEO of Cryptomatic, before embarking on the really complicated part of the process
I got the idea for the exploded 3D view while I was looking for blueprints of watches on Pinterest. I had just finished The Bitcoin Bull is Under Construction just a few weeks before that, and was looking for something with really challenging mechanical elements to work on next. I ended up asking for 2D diagrams of the Envoy, and merging those with exploded watch views of classic watches to build the five-level structure you see in the final piece.
I finished this illustration back in early April, and a canvas print of it now resides in the Cryptomatic offices in Hong Kong.
