0x6205···6110I wanted to inscribe the first story here shortly after minting. Bastien did such an incredible job re-creating my childhood room.
The main difference being the posters on the wall being more focused on my current self, as opposed to the Donnie Darko, Gladiator, and Scarface posters that hung on the walls back in my teenage years.
We recently moved our oldest Son into his own room and got him his own bed instead of a crib, and we will be moving our youngest in the coming months to his. These rooms will take shape initially from what we decide to fill them with, to what each kid wants respectively. Currently Calvins room has decals making it look like a forest, but with his time in there and some days being bored trying to fall asleep he has begun picking them off of the walls, so that won't last long.
I'm excited to see what the years bring, and how their rooms will evolve with them. Calvin loves Construction sites right now and how long will that stay so exciting? Lando is still learning what he loves but so far it seems that he likes what his brother likes.
Looking forward to the years to come and the way these rooms will hold their own stories.
Calvin Age 3 1/2
Lando 1 1/2
0x151E···CFE9*An artist-collector pilgrimage to create a distinctive artwork with a personal narrative.*
## Introduction and brief
This artwork is the first artist-collector collaboration I did. I am honoured that the person to collect this from me is my friend Mondoggg.
At the time of finishing this piece, we have known each other for about 7-8 months, but ever since our first link up we have been vibing strong. It didn't take long before we started talking about a commissioned piece.
I had always admired his persona in the space, his engagement with projects as well as his collector's taste, and secretly hoped that one day I'd be lucky enough to have my 1/1 collected by him.
And here we are, and it's not even the first one that he acquired. *What a life!*
The creation process was fun since the beginning. From the very first minute, the goal was to combine my artist's signature and freedom of expression with a personalized narrative we had come up with together for this then piece-to-be.
**Mondoggg had three main pillars of interest:**
- He likes erc-6551 and wanted to utilize it.
- He wanted not only to get a personal artwork, but to be able to sell it down the line; allowing us to focus on a balance of making it personal but also general enough that it would be special to many who grew up in a similar time
- He wanted me to have an artistic freedom.
For me it was much simpler, I wanted to create something cool and stay true to myself.
**We rocked both.**
## The Idea
After a while we came up with the following scheme: I'd create **a teenage boy's room** in my signature style.
This room would be created based on some of Mondoggg's memories from growing up while keeping the layout of the room similar to the one he grew up in.
This artwork would then serve as an erc-6551 container for another artwork, a close-up animation of a specific part of the room, a box with VCRs.
This box would then be minted on a Transient Labs erc-721TL contract. The special thing about this contract is that you can mint text information onchain along with the token. *You can also do it infinitely more time as long as you own the NFT.* A great example of this feature is this behind the scenes you are currently reading.
The conceptual purpose of this box has been to be a carrier of memories onchain. From now onward, Mondoggg can document growing up of his son by inscribing important memories right onchain.
In case Mondoggg ever decides to sell the main 1/1, he will transfer the VCR box out of its' wallet to his own or any other. This is the box of memories you carry from house to house, from home to home. They will always be with you.
TLDR: Main artwork is a classic Bastien piece, box with VCR is a personal touch specially for the collector.
## Process
Documenting the creation process has always been greatly important for me. Since the beginning, my art has been revolving around getting close to my viewers and relating to each other in what it conveys. So understanding where my art comes from is a key step in my creative process.
As usual I wanted to incorporate 90s references like (Meta)Mask or games we all knew and played as children. My special treat for Mondoggg was featuring easter eggs of his web3 business endeavours to make it even more personal.
The biggest challenge behind this piece was probably the combination of a different approach both conceptual and visually. The artwork is still within my style, but it's a bit more mellow and I had to play around in compositing a lot to reach this kind of result. I am happy that I did.
## Conclusion
After those few months of talking about the piece, coming up with a new ideas for it and letting it mature in the chat and in our heads, I can positively say that I am very satisfied with the artwork.
Since the beginning of my 3D journey I had always been looking to be able to inject more of anime-ish spark into my art. I felt like I needed to learn how to produce that sort of dreaminess that I liked so much in order artists' works.
I finally found the way to do it, here, in **Point of Origin**.
I am even happier with the whole concept of this artwork. There does not exist a better person to acquire this piece than Mondoggg, and I am absolutely thrilled for the message this piece carries and how it extends to more general and less personal topics.
It's about parenthood, keeping memories for future generations, and it warms me up right in my heart.
0x151E···CFE9Introduction
=======
Joyn me (he-he) in my journey back to the place of happy childhood memories once again. This time the adventure is going to take us back to those summer camps most of us used to visit.
Motivation and the general idea
=======
There were two initial sparks that made me sit down and start working on this piece. The first one was the general idea of bunk beds being a good theme for playing that nostalgia note. A lot of people have siblings and underlining the theme felt like a good connection to emotionality.
Unfortunately I do not have siblings so choosing summer camp bunk beds felt more aligned to my personal experience.
The other motivation was reminiscing my childhood the other day. I had one very specific summer camp that I used to visit every summer for multiple years. I think that in the end I went there for 7 or 8 summers in a row. Many of my growing-up experiences happened there. The name of the camp was Summer Time.
*What Summer Time gave me:*
* One of my first real-world heroes when I watched an older (17 lol) guy do a backflip;
* Understanding that people can like me (I was very unpopular in school, not so much on Summer Time);
* My first kiss (and break-up);
* It was one of the first places where I realized that I was talented for English (a big thing when you are 10);
* My ultimately favourite soda (still being made in south Czech Republic, those yellow crates and bottles in the artwork are those sodas);
* And many others..
Summer Time was an incredibly forming experience for me, and I cannot believe that this is the first time I have taken the theme and imprinted this set of memories in my art. But finally here we are.
Technicals
=======
After working on a quite different Wait Here piece and then absolutely trashing my mental health on another piece for 2 months (that I didn't even finish), I dived into more comfortable waters. I circled back to a mix of cartoonish and realistic depiction of a rather small environment, a cottage room.
What I have always felt like is that a certain level of playfulness in my style is a key element to emphasize what my art is supposed to say: There is a little kid inside of you, don't ever forget about it.
After the Curfew is a manifestation of that.
*Note-worthy technicalities:*
* 1.33:1 Αspect ratio. Second piece done within these dimensions, nevertheless still a novelty in my whole body of art. Up until recently they have almost exclusively been coming in square ratios.
* For more Blender/3D savvy enjoyors: Outlines and strokes are done by mixing Grease Pencil and Solidify Modifier. My process of outlining objects in my artworks was always done 99% with Solidify Mod. and using black materials for paper outlines.
What I have done here is that the bottles, floor and wall planks are also slightly stroked-out using the grease pencil method. That effect ultimately strengthens the overall cartoonish vibe of the piece.
* I found an absolute gem of a way to get those bunk beds some edge wear. Now they are heavily worn out by all those kids living in the cottage over the years.
* Since After-Effects is currently receiving a silent treatment from me for being such a laggy software, the whole compositing and postproduction has been done in Blender. All colour grading, vignette, glares, grain, you name it. Everything you see is fully done in Blender. First of it's kind regarding my art.
* Sound done by my girlfriend. The gist is that I've collaborated with my girl and she provided the piece with this beautiful sound design. Feel free to read more about this below in the following section.
The inspiration for After the Curfew was intense and the work was very focus-driven. I finished the piece in just about 4 days of work (+ rendering times and post production).
I guess I just had to get it out, to feel better and remember those times of summer camps.
Soundtrack
=======
Sound design has been a very important part of this creative process. The music in the background is made by my brilliant musician girlfriend.
This is a huge step forward for me personally since I have always been a very lone wolf and wanted to do everything by myself. I am happy that I found the courage within myself to let her in on my creative process, because the result is worth it.
She is – just like me – a very intuitive person, so working on this together was a pleasure. I showed her the first phases of the artwork and told her what vibe I was going for (basically briefed her). She then did some magic with her keys and in Ableton and here we are, the soundtrack was 90% done.
The final tweaks were my favourite part. We were sitting in our kitchen handing headphones to each other and tweaking small details until the beat was perfect. It was a very bonding time for us.
Then I just took the beat and enhanced it with a sound of some crickets and steps of a supervisor on the gravel outside of the cottage.
*And voilá, sound was done.*
Challenges
=======
Obviously there were some as this was a creative process as any other:
* Compositing in Blender was a huge challenge. I usually use that function of Blender just for a few basic effects like denoising or lens distortion. Here I used it for the complete post-production of the artwork so I had to go through a few videos and just learn a bit more about it.
* Lighting was a bit sketchy. It worked out great but I was struggling a bit with the colour tones and didn't really know how blue should I really be going. I wanted the piece to look nightly but at the same time not dark or eerie.
Final thoughts
=======
After the Curfew was a very intense and quick project for me. It didn't really take long to plan the piece out or to brainstorm too much about it. I just sat down and started working.
All the more reason I am happy the piece worked out so nicely without too deep of a preparation. Looking forward to seeing it's life on the blockchain.
0x151E···CFE9An artwork on the burden of leaving childhood and accepting adult responsibilities.
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Introduction
-----------------
Wait Here is an artwork I was working on while stuck in a darker place and needed to vent. The key theme of the piece is growing up and accepting adult responsibilities. That has been a long-term mental health theme for me.
Motivation and the general idea
-----------------
I have always loved gas stations, they are places of ultimate vibe. Regardless of the time of day, weather or the season of the year you can always find a very specific atmosphere there. Maybe it's the liminality of such places that evoked the artwork idea in me.
The theme itself is not as nostalgic as the others I usually work on, and my key motivation here was not to bring nostalgia, rather to symbolically represent a child-to-adult transition process.
The idea behind depicting this transition was to visually show contradictions between a childlike freeness and an adult control.
– As a child you operate authentically, you do what you want, say what you want. You are pure and living in terms of your Nature. Whereas as an adult, you generally try to be in control of everything you do, you are artificially co-creating and operating within the patterns of the adult world.
– As a child most of your life is organic, free-flowing just like a sunshine, wind or water. As an adult, everything is orchestrated, similarly to the neon lights or the queueing of the cars on the station.
The in-between is the transition. The moment of change when you go from being a passenger to being behind the wheel. This process is just like stopping on a gas station, it's only for a while. You refuel and go down your way. You have no business staying here for long.
Technicals
-----------------
Wait Here is quite different to my usual pieces. When you look at the artwork, you can see it's still based on an atmospheric animation that combines aspects of photo-realism with cartoon elements such as black strokes or cell shading, but I tried a few things differently.
– New aspect ratio. My 1/1s had always came in square aspect ratios. For the sake of a bit experimentation and trying new perspectives for the wide environment I updated to 1.33:1. This gave me a better position for setting up an environment layout, especially the one with a wide flat roof of the gas station.
– The cars are not of my creation. I put a big amount of effort into my pieces so using paid or free model/texture libraries saves me a lot of time and energy.
– Dynamic-er.There is more movement than usual, especially the cars passing each other on the main street. Animating that was fun and pain in the ass.
– Consistent approach. I usually jump in-between tasks frantically. Here I decided to take a more consistent approach and I did a proper order of work for once.
Modeling -> Texturing -> Lights -> Rendering, Postproduction and the rest of polishing works.
The work on this piece consumed about 2 weeks of my time. The most intense phases were texturing that consumed about half of it, and then final lighting, rendering and post production. The scene set is very extensive so it was getting pretty performance-heavy and slow towards the end.
I am very satisfied with the result, I generated a lot of effort and tried many new things working on it, and I feel that the message the piece was supposed to convey is there, at least for me.
Challenges
-----------------
As with any other artwork, there were challenges on the way to the final piece. Those are the most important of them.
– The windows of the surrounding buildings and the gas station are all textures, not models. I created those in Affinity Photo in base colours (teal and yellow) and then adjusted saturations, glossiness and how much they light up in Blender and After Effects.
– Performance was pain in the ass. I work on MacBook Pro M1. Although it is pretty good work station, it struggled a bit with this piece. During the final phases where I was just adjusting details and environmental vibe it was getting pretty heavy. At one point the latency between my click and Blender's reaction to it was about 2 seconds, not great (but again, I am no optimisation wizard).
– The cloud is my favourite final touch. Originally I created it in Blender using crazy 1 hour long tutorial, but the scene got so laggy that I had to take different approach. The cloud is from a 2D texture that I photoshopped (affinity photoed?) out of the sky and colour graded to align it with the overall vibe of the scene.
Then I tracked the motion of the piece in post production and uploaded the 2D cloud into the scene. Thanks to the motion tracking it's movement is aligned to the animation. Gotta pat myself on the back, it was like the second time I was doing something like that.
– The houses were fun. Most of them are built/modelled upon the same basis and have changed texture/colour to make the scene more variable.
Final thoughts
-----------------
Wait Here was created during a not-so-good mental state of mine. Some deep personal issues had been taking a toll on me for a few months prior and this artwork was one of the vents.
I am glad I followed the inspiration for an artwork different than usual because I imprinted what was inside of me into this.
Now I can always go back and look at it to reflect.
BastienArtwork Documentation >>> Motivation > The first ignition for this piece came from a well-known series - Stranger Things. I was binging the show with my girlfriend and I was absolutely dazzled by the 80s aesthetics and all those incredibly balanced and vibrant colours. Everything in the show worked together so well that I knew I had to act on that inspiration. Those of you who watched the show probably know that some part of the story is happening in a mall. An 80s American mall. I decided to approach this on my own, taking what I can and transform it into a nostalgic 90s art with a speck of 80s vibe. This is a universe-expanding piece. One of the stores in the mall is Arcade World, which is another piece of mine owned by a dear friend and a great collector. I reused the elements from the original piece and aligned them to work within the composition of this piece as a tribute to the original one. // Workflow > Although motivated, I started with the wrong foot and spent about 25 hours doing it the wrong way. In my art, I always go for perfect composition and colour balance. The eye of the viewer is supposed to smoothly transition between individual areas and elements of each artwork without being too distracted by anything. This showed to be really difficult in case of a mall. All those flashing lights, noise and rush make it essentially chaotic and it's very difficult to align everything within it consistently. After a week of work I got annoyed, deleted everything except a few main elements (moving staircase mainly) and started over, this time I focused on creating the overall layout without the shops, services and other details first. This should be usual approach in any craft – work step by step and layer detailing. Although as an ADHD individual my case is a bit different. When I work, I jump between phases of the project like a squirrel on cocaine. I model a part of the scene and then go to lightings, texturing only to get back to modelling again just to close Blender and get into Photoshop for 3 hours. My usual work project is a batch of thousands of iterations in a very random order. If you look closely on the final piece, I tried to follow some of the 80s aesthetics, mainly it's the overall grain of the piece and somewhat of an old camera filter effect to underline the overall vibe. Also the soundtrack is based on simple 80s synths (it is literally samples of 80s synths). I attempted to create the final sound design as a combination of the overall noise of any mall and a subtle mysticism engraved into this piece. On the visual side of things, I used paper planes flying around like there was not tomorrow which helps the effect of a rush hour in the place and pleasantly disturbs the basic back-and-forth pattern of the animation. My favourite thing about the piece are most definitely plants (Monstera Deliciosa), most seen in the left lower corner, they are animated in an attempt to give the piece a bit magical vibes. The name “City of the Young” came out of a brainstorming with my girlfriend. She usually brainstorm my art with me, and I came up with the “Young” part. I asked her that malls are for young people, young wannabe thugs and teenagers, after which she added that I should name it “City of the Young” since malls are originally conceptualized as cities. And so here we are, looking on City of the Young. // Epilogue > Originally I started creating City of the Young out of sheer curiosity of how I could approach it, yet ultimately found myself investing a big part of myself in the piece. I also spent long afternoons and weekends in local malls, trying to be cool, or trying not to be uncool. And working on this woke up those things in me again. Malls always were the places to be. We went there with out friend groups to spend time, to chat with girls (actually just sitting in a safe distance from them thinking about how it would be like to talk to them), to eat fast foods and buy stupid things we did not need. They were places for teenagers, for cool people. Those were our **Cities of the Young.** // Tools Used > Blender: Composition, 3D modelling, texturing, lighting, camera and rendering. Adobe Photoshop: Detailed texturing, posters, logos Adobe After Effects: Screens, in-scene videos, color grading, compositing Ableton: Sampling and sound design // Acknowledgements > As always, my biggest thanks goes to my girlfriend Ruthie who has supported me since the day 1 and without whom I wouldn't be where I am now. Second greatest thanks goes to all my online friends, supporters and collectors that have supported and vibed with me despite market sentiments, through good and bad and that made me realize that I can be who I really am and do art that is really me. It's priceless to me. //
BastienArtwork Documentation >>> Motivation > The first ignition for this piece came from a well-known series – Stranger Things. I was binging the show with my girlfriend and I was absolutely dazzled by the 80s aesthetics and all those incredibly balanced and vibrant colours. Everything in the show worked together so well that I knew I had to act on that inspiration. Those of you who watched the show probably know that some part of the story is happening in a mall. An '80s American mall. I decided to approach this on my own, taking what I can and transform it into a nostalgic '90s art with a speck of '80s vibe. This is a universe-expanding piece. One of the stores in the mall is Arcade World, which is another piece of mine owned by a dear friend and a great collector. I reused the elements from the original piece and aligned them to work within the composition of this piece as a tribute to the original one. // Workflow > Although motivated, I started with the wrong foot and spent about 25 hours doing it the wrong way. In my art, I always go for perfect composition and colour balance. The eye of the viewer is supposed to smoothly transition between individual areas and elements of each artwork without being too distracted by anything. This showed to be really difficult in case of a mall. All those flashing lights, noise and rush make it essentially chaotic and it's very difficult to align everything within it consistently. After a week of work I got annoyed, deleted everything except a few main elements (moving staircase mainly) and started over, this time I focused on creating the overall layout without the shops, services and other details first. This should be usual approach in any craft – work step by step and layer detailing. Although as an ADHD individual my case is a bit different. When I work, I jump between phases of the project like a squirrel on cocaine. I model a part of the scene and then go to lightings, texturing only to get back to modelling again just to close Blender and get into Photoshop for 3 hours. My usual work project is a batch of thousands of iterations in a very random order. If you look closely on the final piece, I tried to follow some of the 80s aesthetics, mainly it's the overall grain of the piece and somewhat of an old camera filter effect to underline the overall vibe. Also the soundtrack is based on simple 80s synths (it is literally samples of 80s synths). I attempted to create the final sound design as a combination of the overall noise of any mall and a subtle mysticism engraved into this piece. On the visual side of things, I used paper planes flying around like there was not tomorrow which helps the effect of a rush hour in the place and pleasantly disturbs the basic back-and-forth pattern of the animation. My favourite thing about the piece are most definitely plants (Monstera Deliciosa), most seen in the left lower corner, they are animated in an attempt to give the piece a bit magical vibes. The name “City of the Young” came out of a brainstorming with my girlfriend. She usually brainstorm my art with me, and I came up with the “Young” part. I asked her that malls are for young people, young wannabe thugs and teenagers, after which she added that I should name it “City of the Young” since malls are originally conceptualized as cities. And so here we are, looking on City of the Young. // Epilogue > Originally I started creating City of the Young out of sheer curiosity of how I could approach it, yet ultimately found myself investing a big part of myself in the piece. I also spent long afternoons and weekends in local malls, trying to be cool, or trying not to be uncool. And working on this woke up those things in me again. Malls always were the places to be. We went there with out friend groups to spend time, to chat with girls (actually just sitting in a safe distance from them thinking about how it would be like to talk to them), to eat fast foods and buy stupid things we did not need. They were places for teenagers, for cool people. Those were our **Cities of the Young.** // Tools Used > Blender: Composition, 3D modelling, texturing, lighting, camera and rendering. Adobe Photoshop: Detailed texturing, posters, logos Adobe After Effects: Screens, in-scene videos, color grading, compositing Ableton: Sampling and sound design // Acknowledgements > As always, my biggest thanks goes to my girlfriend Ruthie who has supported me since the day 1 and without whom I wouldn't be where I am now. Second greatest thanks goes to all my online friends, supporters and collectors that have supported and vibed with me despite market sentiments, through good and bad and that made me realize that I can be who I really am and do art that is really me. It's priceless to me. //