Creative process with OMGiDRAWEDit

Artist and illustrator OMGiDRAWEDit breaks down the creative process behind his new piece ‘Skeletons Cant Swim’.

Gm all, as promised I wanted to share the process behind my piece 'Skeletons Cant Swim.’

This piece was quicker to create than something in my traditional style (just a couple of days) but after conversation I realised this work has actually been in process for the last year.

Through various trials and experiments on Fridays (if you follow along with my work you may have seen I try to take Friday to experiment with new things.)

First in picture 1 (on the left) is some loose acrylic and glitchy jungle paintings that I was investigating and making new digital brushes for. My original plan with these paintings was to use them as prompts for AI but upon trying that I found I didn’t like the AI outputs more than I liked the original paintings so abandoned that route.

I knew I was onto something with the paintings though due to @kellybrnz reaction when I showed them to him at NFT NYC earlier in the year! Picture two (on the right) are some of the brushes I’ve built for this looser style of working.

I had also been playing around with some glitches and textures and just creating some abstract pieces in this way. This experiment became a GIF as well.

Then, in May this year, I started having pains in my drawing arm and got diagnosed with Repetitive strain injury (RSI), it turns out that drawing tiny details and lines over and over had caught up with me and I had to stop for a bit.

It took a lot longer to get better than I anticipated and in that time I started to have questions in my mind such as will I be able to draw again and in what capacity?

After a couple months, it's still not great and as drawing is super therapeutic for me I needed to create. So I started making some very loose paintings of fantasy landscapes and abstracts.

While making these paintings and wondering if this was it for me and my arm, I started to think a lot about longevity and legacy and vested interests in art and chains and how I could put some art onchain on Tezos as an artistic response to these questions.

So I decided to start compressing images to see what I could achieve (onchain art has to be really small.)

I tried compressing my normal work and it looked forced and unconsidered, the level of detail didn’t translate and there needed to be a creative process that allowed the compression to look like an addition to the work that added to it rather than took away from it.

This is a super important part to me. (Just because it can be made small, that doesn't mean it should. There was lots of back and forth between the original drawing and the dither tool, changing and subtracting elements to get the feel I wanted.)

So I started adding my loose abstract drawings to the compression tool. Picture 1 (on the left) is uncompressed and the 2nd picture (on the right) is post dither. For the compression, I tried a few tools but the best one or at least my fave is @0xdiid https://dither.diid.art

Now we come to Skeletons Cant Swim, I knew I wanted to try and compile all the elements I had been exploring for my #gifday piece, I began with a super rough idea in picture 1 (far left).

I decided to move it to a square aspect ratio to bring down some file size, as I'm of course trying to get this as teeny tiny as I can to see what's possible when it comes to making art to go 'onchain.'

Once I had made the piece, I glitched it and cut out areas of glitch to add the texture and technoromanticism. These areas are in picture 2 (centre) . Picture 3 (right) is of the pre-dithered background.

Below is a video time lapse of the bulk of the piece being painted / drawn / glitched.

I added the water ripples and sent each frame of the animation to the dither tool to get the pixelated effect I wanted. There are lots of algorithms and colour palettes. I like to use Yliluoma 8x8 and for this chose the Carnival colour palette, I was going to adjust colours afterwards anyway - I really liked the muted palette but I wanted to give it some classic OMG pop. I also drew the skeleton and dithered in the same fashion.

To finish, I put all the frames back into Procreate to animate and recolour and exported them as a GIF. This piece itself isn't onchain (yet) but rather is part of my stepping stones of experiments that I hope will lead to an onchain collection in the future.

Hopefully this gives you some more insight into my creative process, my thoughts and reasoning and how I came up with the GIF that took two days plus one year to make.

Skeletons Cant Swim, by OMGiDRAWEDit, minted on Minted Sep 6, 2024