Jean-Michel Basquiat
Yayoi Kusama
Shirin Neshat
Takashi Murakami
Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Vincent van Gogh
Frida Kahlo
Mark Bradford
Henri Matisse
Salvador Dali
Bob Ross
Client
The Tokenist Art Collective
Role
Illustrator
Overview
I collaborated with the Tokenist Art Collective to create a set of portraits representing innovative visual artists, for the first ever combined PFP and Land NFT project.
The project supports charities and selected artists who want to use art to raise funds.
The 'Tokenist' portraits are unique characters with the combined features of your favourite artists, from great historical masters to modern icons. Each Tokenist curates a VR gallery displaying digital artwork, which is linked to marketplaces and auctions to promote sales.
Challenge
Create inclusive and diverse portraits of visual artists. The design of each portrait is built up on a generic 'base' body, with individual features overlaid on top. These features would then be interchangeable with other artists' to create a total of 9126 unique Tokenists.
Tokenists combining a mashup of artists' features
Process
I roughly sketched out the first few portraits to present to the team. Once I'd created 5 male and female artists, I had enough individual assets to test how they looked when combined with other artists' features.
Every new feature - particularly the hair and hats - was tested against the completed set of images to check that the positioning was accurate. This maximised the number of features to swap with eachother, without any layers unintentionally overlapping. It was time consuming, but I learned quickly to set up guides and test the layer order of the features before getting too caught up in the textures and details.
Because the images will only exist in the digital world of NFTs, the idea was to include texture and a painterly quality to the artwork to visually differentiate them from flat-colour, computerised art.
Step-by-step process
If you have a favourite artist you'd like to see included in future rounds, let me know or join the Tokenist Art Collective discord to make a suggestion.
Testing the interchangeable features between three artists
Thanks to Glenn Shoosmith (Chairman of ProveAnything.com, founder of JRNI), Charlie Cox, Steve Sampson, Martin Alden, and Catalina Guirado for bringing me in on the team.
