My newest #cryptoartwork, The Demonic Philosopher is now available on Super Rare.

NOTE: PeakD doesn't seem to want to show the animated GIF, so you'll probably have to visit superrare to see it.

For anyone who doesn't know me (which is probably most of you. I've just finished a 6 month hiatus from Steem Hive), I usually make a proof of artist blog post about how I make my tokenized artworks.

It serves at once as a way to cement the process in my own mind, reviewing what I did to achieve the final piece, and also as a way to present the work, and process, to others.

Hopefully, some of you can even glean some ideas from this process, and apply some of it to your own artworks !

1. The Raw Materials

I always start out using images extracted from various tools and sources as "raw materials" :

I usually use tools like Weavesilk or Artbreeder to get ready-made raw materials, or use AI tools like Deep Dream Generator applied to Public Domain or Creative Commons images I find around the internet.

In this specific case, I used a new drawing program I acquired through Humble Bundle called Flame Painter 4 to draw something interesting using my graphic tablet:

2. Symmetry, symmetry everywhere !

For this particular piece, I decided to forego AI, and go directly for the jugular, so to speak, by using GIMP's filters to manipulate the symmetry of the original image.

My favorite filter in GIMP is the Kaleidoscope filter, which I use for pretty much every single one of my artworks at some point !

Here's what that looks like with just the basic settings:

And here's how it looks after I've played with the parameters for a dozen minutes or so, trying to find a pattern to extract, to refine, for the final work:

I immediately thought "philosopher Demon" once I saw this guy:

3. Extracting the main character, and designing the background

Now that we have our main character, we can already start making a backstory for him !

I usually don't do this, but this guy was begging for a Lore all of his own:

The Demonic Philosopher is one of the more peculiar demons a sorcerer can call forth.
When summoned, he will accept 3 questions on Reality, the Universe, the laws of Magic or any other such Important question, and answer them after 3 days of meditation and deep thought.

His answers will always be correct, as his meditation allows him to consult the Akashic Records, and he will not stoop to such petty trickery as lies, metaphors or confusing explanations, instead giving the answer in a clear and concise way that gives the summoner exactly what they wanted to know.

Of course, being a demon, there's a catch... ask a question he deems frivolous, and he will refuse to answer you, taking a part of your body or soul as "compensation" for such a waste of time.

You may continue to ask questions till you've got 3 answers, or he takes something too important for you to live without...

So, now that he has a backstory (I made it his token description on SuperRare), we can look at refining his personality a bit and giving him a good backdrop:

The above is way too symmetric.
As much as I love symmetry, over the year and a half I've been making cryptoart, I've learned that there's something more interesting about creating distinct pieces, that aren't purely symmetrical !

So, I started by wiping out the sides that weren't part of our Demonic Philosopher:

Here you can see I'm already duplicating the background and applying different effects to it.

This is because I want to make this an animated piece !

Here I'm using G'MIC-qt, a filter-packed styling plugin for GIMP, to test out different appearances of the background.

I also cleared out some of the excess "features" of our philosopher, so he'd look a bit more like a demon sitting in the lotus position, rather than a mix of symmetrical disconnected parts.

I've also applied the same Kaleidoscope settings on each of the background images I've chosen, and used a Supernova light filter to give him a light in one eye, that varies in intensity.

The overall organization gives 2 images for all 3 backgrounds I've chosen.

One has a dim eye, and the other a shiny one.

All 6 images get a different symbol from the WingDing font integrated in GIMP:

This is to make a kind of "casting a spell" vibe to him, as the eye dims and shines, the symbols changing faster than the background.

I then used Morph Layers filter to create several intermediary images between the ones I created with the differing backgrounds, symbols, and eye lights.

Here's a few different states of the final GIF artwork, since PeakD seems reticent to show the gif:

And that's pretty much how I made the animated #cryptoartwork which is now for sale on Super Rare:

https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/the-demonic-philosopher-9057

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I hope you enjoyed reading this post !

It's the first time in a long while I've made a post on the Steem Hive network.

It's also my first post in the #OnChainArt community !

Don't hesitate to provide feedback about the process or the artwork itself.