Prologue

Hi guys! What's up?! 😃 Hope you've all been well!

I've prepared this topic a while back but for some reason, I've been pushing it for months now. Ultimately I gathered that I might as well just let it out there and hear your thoughts on some aspects of it. Especially given that I'm an artist and I don't own any NFTs at the moment. So we're gonna look at them from an artist's perspective rather than an NFT collector's perspective. 😜

If you own or collect NFTs, I'd be eager to hear your thoughts about this process and how the projects that you follow handle their art-making! I'm genuinely curious about all that! 🤗

On making NFTs

Let us tackle the common grounds:

I noticed a few things from projects like the Bored Ape Yatch Club, CryptoPunks, Coolcats and more:

They all bud from the same conceptual base or template.
Variety comes from the most creative and funny ways: Facial expressions, add-ons, accessories, color changes, dorky animations, etc.
Background changes are also game and it opens so much more ground for variety.

More often than not, this simple additive process where artists start from a base portrait and go wild on everything else is the foundation for many computational algorithms that just randomize which addons are gonna compose the new never-yet-seen NFT. 🤖

In some other instances, the buyer can even browse through the available design options layer by layer and then customize their own NFT much like he would do when making a videogame avatar. 🕹

Let's check some examples:

Quite some time ago, folks from Hive account@surfgurupro flew by me this incipient project of theirs to create something that could blend their deep roots in Environmental preservation, Goodvibes, and the Brazilian surf way of life. Surfguru is the biggest platform for wave prediction in Brazil and promotes a really special movement to protect our oceans and the beaches that harbor their waves. 🤙🌊

So here was my approach to it! First, given the rarity of such a special company as Surfguru I wanted to portray that in their NFT base. For that reason, I picked the Brazilian Hyacinth macaw which is super rare due to its amazing blue hue (which brings in a good connection to the oceans). Let's have a look at the base template for this NFT:

An NFT base artwork created for Hive account@surfgurupro featuring the endangered Brazilian Hyacinth macaw (Arara-azul).

YAY BRAZIL!!! The colorful background is filled with warm colors which contrast well with the beautiful blue of this heck of a charismatic bird! Just look at that smile! Ha! 😜

So how could we build from that?

Well, the next step is to play with addons. Back in the day, I recall Hive account@surgurupro was introducing some custom caps to their awesome attire collection. It became obvious that our NFT friend should wear different caps and perhaps some other attire like the worldwide-known Brazilian football shirt, or the traditional white Surfguru shirt. Let's have a look at some of those add-ons:

A collection of NFT artwork addons created for Hive account@surfgurupro featuring the endangered Brazilian Hyacinth macaw (Arara-azul).

Creating a few other addons that express the values and communicate the sponsors or the likes endorsed by the company would also fit beautifully the purpose of addons here. I believe I've mentioned before how folks from Hive account@surfgurupro such as Hive account@crisciacm and Hive account@luizhadad have been part of (or even sponsored by) Hive account@gnars which has their very own NFT collection under the same name.

I could imagine a sweet merge between our Surfguru macaw friend here and the celebrated Noggles from the Nouns project which Hive account@gnars also supports. The project sponsors the efforts of extreme athletes to pursue their passion and, for surfers, this is absolute rad.

A collection of NFT artwork addons created for Hive account@surfgurupro featuring the endangered Brazilian Hyacinth macaw (Arara-azul) and the Noggles™ from Nouns with the detailing from Gnars .

Okay, this is pretty awesome!

But how could I make an NFT of my own?

We will cover that in my next upcoming post on creating your VERY OWN NFT artwork.
Again, I won't be able to help you on how to get that on the blockchain or "minting" per se.
But for what is worth, I plan on covering every aspect of the manual artistic process that generates the examples shown herein. As you know, I painted these all by hand, so that is what I can teach you how to do. 😅

Let's see how well this post will do over here. If it becomes obvious that this is of general interest to the Hive community, I'm down to get deeper into the details of how we can push our artistic talents toward that goal!

Looking forward to it folks! Have a fantastic weekend!
Cheers,
Galiant

Thoughts on the creation of NFT artwork