Community post
The Overlords Helmet -- a Tokenized artwork
My latest tokenized artwork was inspired by a series of factors that culminated to give me the idea of a floating helmet belonging to an Overlord-type character.
The inspirations were:
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The AvaStars launch of series 2
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Bog Witch, a new song by Madame Macabre
Give it a listen while you read 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XuJYWGeeVQ
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Saurons helmet from Lord of the Rings
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The helmet of the Overlord character from the video game series of the same name
Seriously... you've gotta love this guy:
These were the ORIGINAL minions !
Anyway, let's get to the actual artwork creation process, before I get too distracted, shall we ?
1. Flame Painter 4 Graphic Tablet drawing
I spent some time just randomly playing with flame painter 4, using my graphics tablet and the in-built symmetry options (and brushes... god I love those brushes) to work out a "base" for the artwork:
Blank canvas to start with
Not quite what I'm looking for:
This one is more promising !
Looots of brushes !
2. GIMP, for kaleidoscopic goodness !
After I made the base, I imported it into GIMP to have some fun with it's filters, and to see if there was a better pattern to be found somewhere within the symmetry.
Maybe something up here ?
Now we're talking !
Sadly, as I've come to notice, quite often the preview of a filter will look better than when the filter is actually applied !
Gah... clearly the above is WAY too small, it looks nothing like the preview !
Others might expect filters to show a low quality preview, but I prefer if the preview matches the end result as closely as possible, as it's the feeling the image brings, not it's relative quality level it comes out at, that gives me the basis for my work !
So... I took a screenshot of the preview and imported it back into GIMP 😈
Nothing shall stop me !
Now to see what can be done with it...
Manipulating the 'sides' with a few other filters brought an interesting molten aspect to the colors, but it wasn't quite enough for me.
So, I took once again to my trusty steed the Kaleidoscope Plugin
And lo and behold, something quite interesting can be seen deep in the pattern now !
Let's get closer, and remove a bit of the excess noise to the sides:
The eye was created by making an oval selection, inverting the color, then shrinking the selection, inverting it again (but by another kind of inversion, to keep it interesting), etc.
I also drew some 'horns' by smudging the sides of the helmet out and upwards ^
Then, I used the Anguish filter to darken the colors immensely, giving it the correct vibe for what I was planning :
And started manipulating the colors to make distinct frames:
After than, it was just a question of creating the animation, optimizing it and converting it to 128 colors so it could be made into a proper GIF, and voilà :
So... what do you think, Alien Art Hive ?
Is it Alien enough to be in this group ? 👽
Replies (8)
Thanks for posting, I love seeing your process, I see you were inspired by avastars, I've heard of them but i don't really understand what they are...
Thanks julia !
Avastars is just a generative NFT project, with several rarity levels and features that are mixed and matched to create unique collectibles:
It's gotten a lot of interest for two interesting features:
They store one copy of every single trait (skin colors, background colors, background motifs, eye accessories, eyes, hair, hair color...) in their contract, and every time you want to see your specific Avastar, the system reads the attributes that define it specifically and use those stored base layers to re-create your unique piece.
They're also pretty neat because the unique avastars (the combination of the traits) come with a license for all uses (except, of course, hateful/racistic uses), including commercial.
I had to re-read their presentation to make sure I had it correctly: https://nft.substack.com/p/the-art-of-avastars
I managed to get some interesting ones early in the launch of Series 2 (I kinda ignored Series 1 completely), and sold em for 0.25 and 0.5 Eth respectively to Moderats.
Which means that since my 9 total pieces cost me 0.07 Eth each, and I earned 0.75 Eth from selling 2, I've earned a small 0.12 Eth "flipping" avastars.
Though I'll probably tokenize one more Avastar, to have made at round 10 in total... I just need to be patient and scroll till I find one with 2 (or if I'm extremely lucky 3, Legendary attributes).
I'm planning on including one of them (or maybe more ? still not quite sure) in a tokenized artwork in the future:
Interesting, I wasn't aware that they also gave commercial rights, you did well, seems most of these collectibles it's worth it to get in early :)
It's a bit murky about how the rights will work though, couldn't find a proper license yet, and the distinction between the whole individual Avastar (for which we are granted commercial and display usage rights) and the individual attributes (which are copyrighted) makes it complicated to know what would happen if one were to make an artwork that only really uses part of ones Avastar, if that would be an infringement of the attributes or just creative license (I'm guessing Occams Razor slices at Creative License being allowed, and they'll only really care about the attributes if one tries to use a single one commercially without any modifications or attributions)
But I'm relatively sure they won't go Lawyer-crazy and go after people based on hazy interpretations 😅
And thanks. I do try.
I recently made enough profits from trading the Topps Garbage Pail Kids collectibles on the WAX chain to save up for an Oculus Quest headset... now they just have to be in stock 😥😌
Wow! You've been busy with your art. Have you any time left over to join my new game? It's a little different than the past games and might be more interesting for you.
I'll have to give it a look.
Been a while since I've been very active here on Hive, so trying to get into posting semi-regularly again.
technically I have 4 to 6 artworks with process shots that could be turned into articles here, but I got to find the time for it !
Yea, Spring-time has been extremely busy for me... I hardly get enough sleep. Too many things I want and need to do.
"Congratulations bock on yer promotion!" 😉 -Keptin