The idea for the art came in the winter of 2021, when everyone was already tired of the pandemic, and there was a catastrophic lack of positive emotions. To make a simple and concise art to share some positive emotion, to share happiness and joy, perhaps to give strength to a person, in a world where there is already a lot of negativity going on. After thinking for a long time about the theme of characters, we decided to fix upon Unicorns. In our opinion it is the most obvious and simple visual image of goodness and positive emotions. Having in mind that the art should be simple and funny we decided to make it as simple as possible and what can be more simple than pixel art, something that consists of indivisible elements and fit together to make something whole. Besides, it fits perfectly into our concept of art, where we embody the inner wizard and the embodiment of our dreams, i.e., in fact, it is something very small, an integral part of something huge.
When it was decided what to do and how, we started working on the image on paper (sketches/drafts). Then very schematically we transferred them to pixels and there started work on the details and refinements of the image.
When the work on the art began, considering that pixel art has certain limitations, we realized that we couldn’t art the whole unicorn if we really wanted to, and we realized that we didn’t have to, because the main visual attributes of a unicorn are its horn and mane. So we decided to make a portrait.
When the basic arrays of art were created, it was high time to decide on colors, and then the art itself dictated which palette to use — of course the rainbow was the basis of color solutions, these are open bright colors, no complex ones, because the emotions that we put into the art is happiness and joy in its purest form.
When creating the image of the inner wizard, we should not forget about the attributes of the wizard himself. Of course the unicorn itself is already a magical creature, but sometimes it is necessary to help. So it was decided to give the unicorn magic swords, wands and all the things that fit well in the art. A lot of what we came up with did not fit in the art, because here the pixel grid imposed restrictions, and there it already began to conflict with other basic elements.
The project is made with the help of pixel graphics with a resolution of 32 pixels.
The elements themselves are .png raster elements translated into base64. This was necessary for us, because the conditions we were preparing our work were limited to using program code only. All raster images were passed through the compressor and only then in base64. As a result, we were able to make the project size within 10 KB. For our work, we take the texture of the bitmap image. That’s why the compressor didn’t affect the quality of the final work in any way and helped us reduce the project size by several kilobytes and save the blockchain resources.
We use many groups with parts and their properties. The project consists of 9 main groups, and each group contains from 1 to 13 parts that can be painted in any color out of the pallet. There are also unique parts that have a fixed appearance.
For traits we chose the most important details:
1) Name: formed from three components (body name or body color name, mane name or mane color name, random name from the star list)
2) Head: name of horn
3) Back: name of mane
4) Effects: name of background effects, if any
5) Accessories: name of accessories, if any
In addition, in order to make it unique, we have prepared a color palette, where each range of colors, corresponds to a particular gray.
The pallet is defined by a static set of colors that give excellent results.
After we have randomly chosen a color variant, we take a look at each pixel and check it for the gray shade. In our case these are 224, 207, 182, 155, 124, 89 variants.
In case of a match, we apply the color.
In this way we manage to achieve a large number of combinations. We decided to make a limited edition of 10k copies, unfortunately not enough to show how beautiful and unique our Unicorns can be.
When you do something for quite a long time, you get used to it. We didn’t have a definite release date. The project was almost ready, and it was like we were waiting for something. And then in the middle of May it was like we woke up, just like what are we waiting for, summer is coming soon! The decision was spontaneous — to throw the project into the public eye, collect feedback on the project, and at the same time prepare the website and social media. And then we saw how people were responding to the project, they liked it and there was no point in delaying the start, we had to finish all the preparations in two weeks and make it.
Things began to develop rapidly — sales began. People began to actively push events. Discussion of the art in the price-description thread began to go off the charts, which eventually led to a separate chat on fxhash.
There were coming people with different needs, from collectors for themselves to “middlemen” who were forced to buy art by their children or partners.
Close to the median sales (5K), we started getting offers to burn half of the print run to raise the price on the secondary market. But then the idea we had for the art wouldn’t make the sense that we’d put into it, which was to share positive emotions with as many people as possible. So we did not give up on our plan and went all the way to the end, 10K circulation. And literally in just a few hours it happened, it was wow. We were so happy that we could get so many people to like our art and share it with so many people. A huge amount of information, in the form of people’s emotions, is forever engraved in the history of the fxhash community.
We are still very much impressed by everything that happened, but we continue to work on the next steps to develop the project, the main goal of which is to give emotions.
We are very grateful to everyone who has supported us and continues to support, taken part and will continue to take part in the life of our project. We are glad that many people like our work.
You can follow our events on the Website or on Twitter. We are looking forward to see you on our Discord chat.
by AgataPoison & lucky26
License: CC BY-NC 4.0