My first try at creating generative art/creating 12000nfts

I'm constantly busy even when I look like I'm sitting quietly. My mind is always looking for something new to try and so I decided to create my own nft collectibles. I've always wondered about how 10000 nfts were made. I mean if you've heard about nfts, you probably also know that the people who have made money off it have this number as a collection and on the surface it sounds impressive. I know I thought at first that they laboriously had to draw every single nft and so they deserved to make that much money. Anything really to justify the way they're selling out.

The truth though is that creating 10,000 nfts can be done in just a few hours. What cannot be done in that time perhaps(especially as an unknown artist) is the hype around your creation. You need serious marketing to get people interested in your project and buy into the idea of what you believe to be valuable-your nfts for you to become rich, because isn't that what every nft creator wishes would happen to them?

To help me with this task, I searched on YouTube for some help. I want to say that it is interesting for me to see how tech and art have converged. I've not been on coding tutorials for a while so it was jarring and a bit funny(won't lie) to see non tech people ask tech questions about stuff like visual studio code and pronounce stuff in the coding community with such reverence. I chuckled a bit. Thought it cute. But that's just a side note.

So I found what appears to be the holy grail of nft help on YouTube and it is a tutorial by HashLips NFT. The video is just for 2hrs 30 mins and I believe he gives his all out i.e from judging by the comments under it. I have been able to do just 30 mins of watching and following and yes, I have in that little time, gotten the value I needed which was learn how to generate 10000 nfts from my art.

To begin, creating 10000 nfts on a basic level means that you should be able to multiple ten different characteristics at least 4 times to get this number from the iterated run. What I mean is that you need to as an artist paint in layers. Digital artists who use different painting apps like photoshop, sketchbook pro, procreate are already aware of the concept of painting in layers and that was easy to grasp. Basically each feature you have, say an eye you want to diversify must have all the changes on separate TRANSPARENT layers. This video does not emphasize on this and I learnt painfully on my own after wasting more than two hours creating on a white background and then having the images overlap in the build ugh.

In case this is still not clear, let me use a practical example. I had an idea to have 12 different faces I drew on ibis paint, with at least 10 different types of lips, and about 10 different hairstyles and same amount of clothes for this collection.

This means 12 x 10 x 10 x 10 which gives me about 12000nfts when I run the code provided by HashLips NFT from his github repository here. He gives instructions on what to download when you watch the video. Basically for this part it is just one line of code in the terminal which is 'node index.js'. Pretty straightforward.

Enough with all the talking, let me share a bit of what I did.

I created some faces in ibis paint so this work is entirely mine and I will just use a few samples here for you to grasp the idea:

As you can see, they are without lips and hair because like I said these needed to be on separate layers. Now some lips

Some hair:

Please remember these are just a few samples as I cannot load everything here. Now a few of the iterations that ran after I had listed everything in my config file in order of appearance to be compiled:

I'm yet to delve into the smart contracts side of the tutorial and learn about minting. That's for another day. Cheers!

All content is mine unless stated otherwise