Hello everyone, I'm happy to present my very first Crypto-collectible, Heart of a Blade !

In this article, I'm going to present my creative process (I do believe you call it Proof of Human nowadays ;) ) as well as the platform I've published my collectible on, Superrare, that accepted me as one of their artists just this week !

Before we get to the meat of it, here's what the finished collectible looks like:

Super Rare

A little context first.

There's two main networks, that I've seen and experienced, that collectibles are based on nowadays.

One is Bitcoin, through the Counterparty Protocol

It might not be the most active market, given bitcoin's fees, but the Book of Orbs sub-market is set to gain in popularity as Everdreamsofts Spells Of Genesis game draws the crowd, with it's built-in possibility of transforming one's game cards (and their amazing art) into blockchain assets with hard work in the game.

That, and the presence of what might have been one of the first digital collectible markets for art/memes, Rare Pepe, makes it a very important market nonetheless.

The second place for crypto-collectibles is the Ethereum network, and we've already seen tons of Dapps pop up based on this concept (I think we all remember cryptokitties, though new initiatives like Panda.earth and Cryptopets, both of whom donate a share of profits to Wildlife Protection, or any of the number of very promising Dapps that are about to launch, like Zombie Battleground and Neon District)

Then, there's the pure art market.

The Super Rare platform is one of several places that has appeared in recent times to create Crypto-collectibles specifically for Art collectors, and for the benefit of Digital Artists.

Super Rare allows the creation of certifiably unique, traceable artwork, that can be traded around by collectors.

For now, they've accepted a limited number of artists on the platform (And I'm one of them, Yay !), and have a relatively well thought out system:

They take 3% commission on secondary sales (collector to collector), and none of primary (creator to collector), and artists pay nothing to create their token-bound artwork !
Hell, artists even get 10% of secondary sales themselves (if done through the Super Rare website, of course).

The process is relatively painless, not requiring the artist to eternally host their artwork themselves (they use IPFS after the artwork has been uploaded).

Proof of A.I. Human

To create Heart of a Blade I used several different techniques from previous artworks, combined with what I've learned in terms of image manipulation to make what I consider piece worthy of being "blockchainized".

To start with, I launched Xaos, a real-time fractal Zoom and Exploration tool.

With it, I explored the different Fractal patterns available, till I fell upon The Spider fractal, which immediately reminded me of a Heart (I know... my brain is weird):

I also went over to Weavesilk because, let's face it, in the above image there's nothing very interesting except the fractal itself.

So, I generated a separate background on which I could place the Fractal pattern.

I did half a dozen tests with Deep Dream's Style Transfer algorithm using the below image:

It gave interesting results, but it made the two patterns blend in too much

So, I took the fractal and superposed it with one of the results, so I had 2 very distinct patterns (one black and white, one colored):

After that, I just had to pass it through yet another run of Deep Style (I'm keeping the specific styles chosen secret, so it really is a one of a kind piece of art ;) ) to make a pattern I liked, nay, loved:

Then, I used GIMP, an open source image manipulation tool, to apply some effects, and adjust the symmetrical aspect of the work:

And voila, My first one of a kind Crypto-collectible was born

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The final image is copyright Peter Bock 2018

But the techniques involving Xaos, [Weavesilk]{www.weavesilk.com} and Deep Dream are obviously free to use by everyone, so have fun with them !

I hope you liked my first piece of Blockchain-based Art !
I have plans to make more blockchain based art pieces, one of them being in one of Bitcrystals
collections over on Book Of Orbs, and I will also hopefully be able to begin doing some 3D modelling work again soon.