Ether Tree - 'Artwork'

The quote marks around 'artwork' aren't accidental... This was always going to be the hardest part of the project for me. In my imagination there is a magic ray gun that you can point at someone that gives you an exact readout of their skills*. Maybe something like the handheld scanner at the checkout of a shop. And the readout is exactly like the nutritional information on a packet of food. Point that scanner at omnus and pull the trigger. Right there, near the bottom, is my level of art skill. It says 'trace'...

Anyway, that's kinda the point really. Being bad at something should never stop you doing it.

Drawing 100 trees

So I set about trying to draw 100 trees. Obviously they were going to look like something a four year old could draw, that was a given, but my biggest concern was that some wouldn't look like trees at all.

So I cheated. I drew one tree that looked enough like a tree that I suspected most people would know it was a tree ("WTF is that" is still an expected response). And then I manually applied changes to the elements of that tree.

I'd already decided on a low number of trait categories. There are only 100 NFTs after all. Ether Trees have just five trait groups: trunk, foliage, facing, feature and bird. This allowed me to copy and paste tree elements and alter things like colour and position. It also allowed me an easy path to control rarity. Half of the trees have a dark brown trunk, for example, while only six (six!) face right. There is a single 1 of 1 tree... but more about that later.

It also makes the maths super easy. There are a hundred trees, so if six have your trait you know that it's one of just 6% with that characteristic. I can only assume that OpenSea's servers run a bit more coolly when people browse Ether Tree.

Inkscape

Nothing fancy here folks. Many years ago I typed into google "best free app for drawing" and google led me to inkscape (https://inkscape.org/). I've been using (abusing?) this app ever since. Might not be the best tool, but in this case the tool is never going to be the limiting factor.

Inkscape allowed me to create the 100 trees as I wanted, cut, paste and modify. When they were ready I exported each one by hand to a png. Next I needed to create metadata that matched the artwork, and get all that permanently persisted on a blockchain.

And for that I'll write a post on metadata :). (Keeping these posts snappy and on one topic at a time. Or at least trying to...).

* FWIW, if such a thing did exist, I firmly believe that every person you pointed it at would result in the reading of "Potential: Unlimited!". Go get 'em tiger, scanner says you've got this.