I figured it'd be a good idea to explain the "Hexagones: Art for Bots for Humans for Print" project a little. More than just it being a print-based generative art drop on fxhash (the prints of which you can buy here). We'll start at the beginning with...

Hexagones: Art for Bots.

It all started with "A Slight Case of Overbombing", a generative art drop on fxhash of 256 NFTs. For those that don't know, fxhash runs on the Tezos blockchain, itself a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Etherium, but far more ecologically friendly, also called "clean NFTs".

For the Tezos blockchain, a person has a "wallet" that keeps hold of their balance and allows them to perform operations on the blockchain. Typically (for generalisation here), those operations are buying, selling or transferring NFT artwork. But, if you're an artist, those operations will also include registering a project and then launching it. Once launched, other people can then buy ("mint") the artwork until they are all gone.

For various reasons, a few automated "bot" systems were set up to watch my wallet for the publishing and launching actions in preparation for A Slight Case of Overbombing. Partly because I'd previously announced it on Twitter and partially because my previous projects over on ArtBlocks sold out almost instantly, especially the smaller "Bonus" projects with very limited numbers.

The idea is that the moment those bot networks saw the instructions to launch the project, they could swoop in and buy ("mint") the artworks ahead of people watching the website and going through the process manually.

These bots would then "flip" the artwork, trying to sell it for a mark-up to people who wanted one but couldn't snag one before they all went. The margins are narrow, but with a bot network grinding away buying and selling enough work, a steady profit could be pulled in.

Bot networks are also set up to watch the secondary market for specific projects, looking for people accidentally listing sales far below the proper value.

One bot can sweep in, grab a mispriced artwork, and immediately "flip" it to another bot and so on until finally, a human buys it. There are all sorts of reasons why some art could get passed around various bot networks over a period of time.

Which led to the question, what would art designed for just the bots look like? If there's this underground network of bots trading in art, why not make some that they can "enjoy". Suppose the bot networks that work on tiny margins used AI to learn what aesthetics humans liked by observing buying and selling patterns. Could they spot a successful project with their "curator's eye" before everyone else? After all, they just need a slight edge, faster reflexes and more turnover with small margins to make a steady passive income.

This is, of course, a design fiction, but one of the jobs of art is to ask questions from within the framework they operate.

In this case, the framework the bots were operating in was to watch my wallet for a project to launch, which we'll come back to in a moment.

I decided that bots probably like Hexagons, clean, sharp lines, and solid blocks of colour. It was also a little reflection on Twitter launching NFT integration. If a Twitter user connects their account to their NFT wallet, they could pick an NFT to be their avatar, displayed not in a standard circle but in an on-the-side hexagon.

As there are bot networks on Twitter, too, it seemed logical (in our design fiction) that a bot operating on the social network, while also trading in NFTs (and trying to manipulate the price of those NFTs via its network) would want an NFT that fitted neatly into that hexagon format.

Now back to our artwork buying bots. A quick observation was that the bots weren't set to attempt to just automatically buy the next project launched from my wallet, (putting them into competition with humans), but rather just to watch for any project launch from my wallet.

This seems reasonable because I'd only announced one project, the "A Slight Case of Overbombing" drop. However, I didn't reveal that almost immediately after that drop, I was also launching the "Hexagones: Art for Bots" project. So-called "Hexagones" instead of "Hexagons" because I knew they'd all be "gone" ("Hex-a-gones", see, a hilarious play on words, I'm so smart) instantly before any actual person knew about them.

Art made explicitly for bots.

Hexagones: Art for Bots for Humans

As a follow-up, I worked on an updated version ("Hexagones - Art for Bots for Humans") with a design heavily influenced by the retro-future aesthetic of the Designer's Republic, something I remember people back in the late 1990s enjoying.

This was specifically designed to "Air Drop" (the act of transferring an NFT directly from the artist to the collector of a previous piece of work) to holders of an "Hexagones: Art for Bots" artwork, most of which had now moved from the bots to people.

The first "Hexagones" drop was made and sold to bots, the second was gifted to the humans eventually holding those pieces, and the third, well...

Hexagones: Art for Bots for Humans for Print

Hopefully, it's apparent that the "Hexagones" trilogy is not a set of typical projects but rather a chance to play and explore different mechanisms by which projects can be created on the fxhash platform.

People who know me and follow my work understand my love for print and physical work, so I was looking for a way to fit that into what you can do on fxhash.

There have, of course, previously been generative art projects where the result is a print. Some take the form of a website where you can play with sliders or keep refreshing results until you see something you like and then order a print of it. Others take the form of highly curated results from a generative system and making prints of the best ones.

And it's not uncommon for a project to offer a print of an NFT to the owner of the NFT, something which has happened on both ArtBlocks and fxhash.

The order of operations in those cases is that you buy the NFT and then order a print of it if you wish. With the "Hexagones: Art for Bots for Humans for Print" project, I'm putting that the other way around, someone buys a print, and then the NFT can be transferred to them if they want.

Part of me wishes that the workflow would be automated; you hit the buy button on fxhash, the artwork is generated, sent to print, and finally sent out.

The puzzle pieces are almost there; I can write code to spot when someone buys one of the NFTs, I can write code to upload the results to Shopify automatically. The bit that I can't (easily) do is automate the printing with my favourite print shop, The Print Space. They don't have an API or backend system I can just plug into, and I don't particularly have an interest in working with a different print shop.

It's not unsolvable, but I also understand why someone wouldn't want to commit to "blind buying" a print; you don't know what the result will look like until you've hit the buy button.

This is less of an issue with digital NFTs, where it's relatively trivial to sell the one you got if you're not keen on it and buy a different one on the secondary market.

Instead, with this project, I've decided to pre-mint nine Hexagones, which are then all owned by me. Then send them to the print shop to get printed, wait for them to arrive in the post, number and sign, take photos and finally put them into the shop.

When (and if) someone buys one, I send it off, "mint" another piece, get it printed, and put it into the shop — always attempting to have around nine available at any one time, although, of course, there will be a slight delay when re-stocking.

I particularly enjoy the point we're at in technology that I can have a series of 216 artworks (6x6x6 = 216, to keep with the hexagonal theme) where each one is different. The physical print component can be as unique as the digital NFT part.

I am not expecting to sell all the Hexagons, and I'll be surprised if I sell more than a dozen. As with the other two parts of the project, it's more about the concept, the playing around and pushing at the edges, trying to see just what directions you can take the platform in with a little bit of work.

If you wish to buy one, there will probably be around nine for sale in the shop, maybe less, but give it a few days to get back up to nine, and all will be good. The shop accepts bitcoin/Ethereum/Tezos payments at the checkout stage via coinbase.

Paper and pricing

This isn't part of the "What is Hexagones" post, but I thought I'd add it here for people interested in such things.

Each one is a Giclée print on Hahnemühle Pearl 285gsm paper, which I've chosen because of how well it's suited to bold colours and retains a lovely subtle texture. The Print Space have this to say about it...

Hahnemüle Pearl has a smooth orange peel texture and a bright neutral white base, it creates really natural black and white images and offers vibrant colour reproduction and great detail too. The paper is resin coated with a fibrous feel. The satin finish of the resin coating gives depth to the image which combined with the texture and vibrant colour reproduction give the image the feel of an oil painting. This is one of the most suitable of the Giclée Art Paper range for mounting.

The print is 12x12 inches, made up of the print area at 11x11 inches with a 1/2 inch border all around. They are numbered and signed.

The general rule of thumb I take with selling prints is to triple the cost of printing, then roll in the shipping costs of it coming to me and sending it out. Normally it would be x5 for signed prints, but in this case, I'm sticking with the x3.

Printing: £14.65
Shipping to me: £11.99
Shipping back out (on average): £11.99

Which means the final price is £14.65 x 3 + £11.99 x 2 = £53.28

Rounding that up to a nice £58 means that there's a profit of £58 - £14.65 - £11.99 - £11.99 = £19.37 on each one.

In various currencies, that makes the final price/profit per print at the time of writing...

If on the crazy wild not-going-to-happen chance that all 216 prints sold (which they won't), the total profits would be: £4,184/$5,246/1,890xtz.

Considering the time to create the print, order the print, sign and package it, and then put it back into the post, this is most likely a terrible idea.

But it is a fun one!

Once more, the shop is over here: https://shop.revdancatt.com/collections/hexagones-print

🤖 🤖 🤖

A little bit of scene-setting to start; Concord is a Tezos based NFT generative art project, with 256 pieces released (by me) on the fxhash platform.

I wrote it at a time where my ArtBlocks "80s Pop: Variety Pack (for experts only)" project was around halfway through, and my "80s Pop: Dancerama" print project had just finished. Both projects were quite resource-intensive, both mentally and time-wise. To get refreshed, I decided I needed to go back to a core principle of art, remove as much as possible (and then some more). I needed a sense of peace, calm and balance.

fxhash seemed to be the perfect place to do it, and I started with a simple concept: have some sticks and circles and then remove some.

I will write two versions of this post. The first version (this one) is about artistic decisions, and the second will have the technical code details. Hopefully, from the first version, you'd have enough information to write your own implementation; the second version will tell you how I did it. I'll link to the second one here once I've written it.

A quick note: there's a lot of words here to essentially try to explain the instinctual process of making art, built on all of my experiences to this point. The truth is most of this happens in a split second of "Oh yeah, I'll put something together that feels right". But it turns out that unpacking "that feels right" takes longer than actually doing it. So please don't for a moment think that I figured out all of the below before I started, but rather this is looking back and trying to explain the decisions that I made in more detail than probably went into them.

It should however be enough for you to "read" each piece in the collection, which is somewhat satisfying.

Artistic version.

There is a lot wrong with this diagram, but it annoys the right people.

The first place to start is the canvas, as trivial as this may sound.

The default canvas shape for NFTs seems to be the square. Purely anecdotally, I put this down to people building web3 stuff quickly, and displaying squares in the UI is the fastest thing to do.

And so form follows function; websites show squares because it's the easiest, so the artwork is designed for that shape.

Let's go through a whirlwind tour of art history, photography and web development. First, we have landscape photos and paintings being the predominant standard because generally, it doesn't involve people, and anything not involving people is easier to set up. After that, we have portrait painting and photography. While square format cameras exist, they are certainly in the minority.

Video was, until very recently, almost exclusively landscape in format.

Instagram kicked off the whole square format, partly because it echoed the nearly square form of Polaroid film (the instant film) and because it made throwing together the layout on the website pretty easy, especially as the focus was mainly on the mobile app.

As phones became the primary method for viewing social media and the creators' demands to take up more screen space, the obvious direction was to get taller rather than wide. Something which pains traditional landscape artists as any wide photo now appears as a thin slither across the mobile screen.

All of the above means the visual language that we often speak on the web is now either square or vertical, and the default for web3 seems square. To the extent that we're now seeing the development and demand for square format monitors and digital picture frames.

With all that said, making a non-square NFT rather than the default square is now an intentional act; there has to be a good reason for it.

In this case, I wanted to blend between print and digital; the code I was writing needed to work on both. In addition, as I primarily use a pen plotter and plot onto standard A4, A3, A2 and A1 paper, it made sense for me to use the 1:1.41 ratio in portrait orientation.

I also wanted the digital version to be evocative of print.

If we look at some of the more popular recent ArtBlocks projects, we can see they all follow the portrait format: Bent, Asemica, Edifice, and Fidenza being four examples, all around the 1:1.25, 1:1.333 and 1:1.41 ratios. With the recent ones even including subtle textures to the background to feel more like the paper used in print.

I'm going to make a very general and exceedingly flawed statement: I feel that portrait orientated NFTs seem "classier" than standard square ones, to me.

This brings me onto...

Aesthetics

I'm in the middle of my next ArtBlocks project, "80s Pop: Variety Pack (for experts only)," which is intentionally a throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-it square format project (the later for (hopefully) curated "70s Pop: Deluxe" version will be going for the classier portrait/print orientation), and my recent print/NFT "80s Pop: Dancerama" project was pretty full-on.

So I was looking for something calm, peaceful and elegant to bring a little balance back to my life. I went back to the ancient art adage that less is more and subtract when in doubt.

I also wanted to work on a project that I could complete quickly to remind myself that it was possible, as everything else has been taking months to finish at the moment, and I was started to wonder if I was the problem 😁

I'd been playing with the idea of sticks and circles for a while and had been thinking about ways to add more to it. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to practice some simplicity, and I decided to stick with just the sticks and circles and apply some straightforward aesthetic rules to it.

Sticks

All rules are made to be broken, but I think a good starting point for a piece of art is to have a good foundation or skeleton on which you build up more refined details. For example, my foundation for Concord is a grid of sticks; an entire "grid" is a three-by-four layout.

Because I wanted more variety, the first step was to create a rule that there could be one to three vertical lines...

...and one to four horizontal ones...

By keeping this number low, I tap into two powerful concepts. The first is simple symmetry. A single line down the middle is a solid visual foundation, and I get that with layouts with one or three lines.

Both the advantage and disadvantage of symmetry is that it's very direct, the brain understands it quickly, it makes a bold image, which is good for intentional focus (i.e. looking at to meditate), but doesn't necessarily hold the interest of the viewer for very long if they are casually looking at it. So, in short, it tells the story quickly.

A trick in art and photography is the rule of thirds. If you see a tree on the horizon, instead of centring it in the image, you put the horizon on the one-third or two-thirds line down and the tree one third from the left or right of the frame.

This is such a common rule that photo apps on the phone or cameras will often superimpose a grid divided into thirds to help you form the composition.

Whenever my algorithm picks two lines, it divides the space into thirds. So rather than placing the lines randomly into the scene, I have a win-win situation; it's either down the middle or using the rule of thirds.

Having a good grid foundation means we can subtract from it before doing anything else.

The next step is for the algorithm to throw some of the sticks away. There's a 25% chance of a stick being removed in this case.

By removing a stick here or there, we undo some of the balance and symmetry, making the scene slightly more dynamic. We'll come back to adding balance back in, in a moment.

Here are some examples...

Circles

We have our skeleton; we can build up and add a little meat onto it. This happens in the form of circles and semi-circles.

There are three parts to this process, position, size and style.

The first is that each circle has to be attached to a stick. So in our code, we first go down the vertical sticks randomly-ish placing circles.

And then we go across the horizontal sticks (randomly-ish) placing them.

Just as we didn't randomly place the sticks, we also have some rules for the placement of the circles. First, they can be centred on the intersections of the sticks and the halfway points between them, as shown here...

It would be too simple to place them just at the intersections, but it'd also be too freeform to place them anywhere. Having the midpoints be anchors gives us a good mix between the two. It also allows for interesting overlaps and offsets in the circles.

Concord #192, Concord #126 and Concord #92

If we placed a circle at every possible point, the results would look something like this...

Now we know where we can place the circles; the next question is how big they should be.

The base size of the circle has the radius be the same as the space between the lines, and you can see this on one, two and three line outputs here...

Having decided where to put them, it's once again time to add some variety to make them more (but not too) dynamic. Again, we do this with controlled randomness, and this is where you are once again making an artistic decision.

With Concord, having decided the radius of the circles, when then modify them to either 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of that size. I could have chosen for them to be any size randomly from 1% to 100%, or I could have chosen 100%, 64%, 32%, 16%, 8%, 4% to favour the smaller circles, or go the other way of 100%, 96%, 92%, 84%, 68% and 36% (which is 100-4, 100-8, 100-16, 100-32 and 100-64).

Your role as a generative artist isn't to throw everything over to randomness but to shape that randomness in the direction to want things to go. Here I wanted circles at the intersection of two sticks to be able to sit inside each other with a reasonable (and standard) amount of overlap.

Here's a couple of examples.

Concord #39, Concord #86 and Concord #51

The final design choice was having semi-circles and whole circles. I liked the idea of having semi-circles offset on both sides of a stick.

This explanation will overcomplicate things a little, but I think it's an interesting example of how an artist can make choices and apply randomness and chance in slightly different ways.

At each potential point, one approach would be to have a percent chance of each side turning up. For example, if you said, "At each point, each side has a 50% chance of showing up", then the code is easy. You get to a point, and there's a 50% chance one side shows up, then a 50% chance the other side shows up. This means 25% of the time, no sides show up, 25% of the time both sides show up, and the rest of the time, either one side or the other shows up.

If I decided that made the final design too busy, I could tune those numbers downwards. For example, if they came down to 20%, then each time there's a 4% chance a whole circle shows up, a 32% chance that only one side shows up, and a 64% chance there's no circle.

Instead, the approach I took was to have a base percentage chance that something would show up, allowing me to control how many points I wanted a thing to show up, which I set at around 20%. Then once having decided that something was going to show up, there was a 20% chance that something was a full circle. If it wasn't a full circle, then there's a 50/50 chance of it being one side or the other.

I felt that, in this instance, the second way of working things out gave me a bit more control than the first way. But there are instances where using the first method may have made more sense.

The main point is that there can be several similar ways of doing something, but it's up to the artist and their experience to decide which is most suitable in each situation. The more ways an artist knows how to do something, which comes from experience and playing, the more tools they have at their disposal.

This doesn't make it any better; someone starting out could hit on the very first thing, and it be amazing. But as with most art, the greater the understanding of all the available tools, the more flexibility the artist has to adapt to the challenges an artwork may throw up.

Dots

With Concord, I took the approach that less is more, subtracting and removing things where possible. Throwing away sticks, having only half a circle instead of a whole one, keeping the number of circles added pretty low. Now it was time to add something back in to restore a little bit of the balance.

This is the part most likely to raise an "Oh yeah, I see that now" reaction.

The "Dots": red circles that are generally smaller are placed along the removed sticks.

I wanted the dots to be slightly more controlled, and I wanted them to often float in the negative space left behind by the removed sticks. The sticks formed the skeleton, and sometimes a void was left.

The code is basically the same as the circles above, but instead of running down and across the sticks that were there, we run along where the removed sticks were and only at the intersections, no half points here.

Concord #186

Finally, instead of a 20% chance of a circle appearing, I opted for an 80% chance for a dot (or another way, an equal chance of a dot appearing as there was of a circle being missing). Restoring the balance while keeping the dynamism we introduced removing the sticks in the first step.

In the spirit of show don't tell, here are some examples, where now you know what to look for, you can see the red dots appearing along the missing sticks.

Concord #185, Concord #178 and Concord #205

Concord #156, Concord #130 and Concord #93

It's kinda fun to go look at the whole collection to see how the layout rules are being applied now you know how they work.

Background and Ink

Up until this point, everything I was doing could (and would) work with a pen plotter, which was the intent. However, one difference between pen plotting (and print) is the chances of the pen plots being seen together as a collection is slim. Instead, they will be mainly viewed as individual pieces, so the background of the pen plot won't be presented along with hundreds of others.

Gallery view on fxhash

The digital versions would be displayed together, and I wanted to think about how they would look as a collection. Utilising background colour is an excellent way to do that and break up the "grid" a little bit.

There's not too much to go into here. I already knew I wanted an off-white background as I had some off-white paper I wanted to pair those digital/physical ones up with.

Concord #58

Inverting things to have a black background doesn't always work, and I nearly didn't here. So I rejected the black background until I added the red "dots", which tipped me back over the other way.

Concord #27

"World on Fire" was inspired by this image...

Left: Concord #75. Right: unknown origin.

While "parchment" was snagged from somewhere in here...

Left: Concord #242. Right: Old Plum, Kano Sansetsu, 1646, Met Museum.

The pink, blue, green backgrounds are a nod to the ArtBlocks project Ensõ by Matto, which I've always loved. Ensõ is (according to Wikipedia) "The ensõ symbolises absolute enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and mu (the void). It is characterised by a minimalism born of Japanese aesthetics".

Because Matto's Ensõ and my Concord are both working in a similar space and aesthetics, I thought making a slightly stronger parallel between them would be interesting.

Concord #40, Concord #184 and Concord #195

There's a chance that the background would get converted to a gradient fill instead of the standard solid fill with each of the above three colours or the parchment style.

Summertime is, of course, a link back to my own 70s Pop Super Fun Summertime Bonus Pack 🍸 ArtBlocks project.

Left: Concord #20. Right: 70s Pop Summertime print.

While showing up just once is '80s', which is a link forwards to the upcoming "80s Pop: Variety Pack (for experts only)" project, because the colour scheme is very reminiscent of the black, white & red wallpaper and stylings you got around in that era.

Concord #199

Meanwhile, the "Ink" colours are very subtle, with just four main types; black, ink, wash, and off-white.

Black, Ink, Wash, Off White

There's a bit of coding behind the scenes to adjust the ink colour when a dark background is selected to make sure something shows up. But, again, I'll cover that in the coding post.

Also, the shade of red on the black background, which was initially chosen from this image...

...is sometimes changed into a brighter red or the same colour as the parchment background.

Concord #219 and Concord #148

Wobbly lines

The wobbly lines serve both an aesthetic and practical purpose.

Because one of the rules of generative NFTs on both ArtBlocks and fxhash is that they have to be resolution-independent. The need to work at any scale and on any display. While that could be a high-resolution screen, and heading into the future probably will be, they also often show up as thumbnails and sometimes on large outdoor displays that are big but have low resolution.

They also get viewed in online galleries where they'll often start small in the distance or VR headsets which again are relatively low resolution.

When you display several straight lines on a display that doesn't have many pixels, and the number of pixels doesn't cleanly divide by the number of lines you have, the display starts to cause weird interference patterns to appear as attempts to smear your straight lines between pixels.

For example, a tiny display with 64 pixels can easily display 32, 16 or 8 lines...

32, 16 and 8 stripes

But when you try and display something like 13 or 21, things can start to get a bit weird.

13 and 21 stripes

By adding a wobble to my lines, I'm not only simulating the pen on rough paper effect I like so much when pen plotting, but I'm reducing the problem of the artwork being shown at smaller scales.

Left: Without wobble. Right: With wobble.

The interference/banding is still there with the wobbles, but it smooshed together into more of an overall texture, which fits the design better. Of course the above images being scaled down to display on whatever you're viewing this on will introduce even more issues 😆

Price

It may seem a bit odd to throw price in here too but, aside from a whole other blog post about "Being a working artist, NFTs and Money", I think the price can also be an artistic choice that can fit in thematically with the project as a whole.

In this case, 7 tez is, of course, a reflection of 7 being (generally) a lucky number. But also in a layout with one central vertical line and four horizontal numbers, there are 7 points (four intersections, three mid-way points) onto which a circle could be placed, similar to the seven Chakra.

I'm not saying you have to make price part of the artwork itself, but given a chance, and if the maths makes sense, I'll give it a shot.

Feature script

Beyond the project's visual aspect, there are two last places to tell the story; in the description...

"An experiment between pen-plotter, ink, paper and digital. A visual Koan in which our brain finds balance. In a sometimes overwhelming digital world, this art is an attempt to a respite."

...and in the features script.

The features script is where the artist takes code elements, which can often be numeric and turns them into something human-readable. This is one last chance to guide the viewer in their interpretation of your art; after this, it's all down to them.

Some of my features are just factual; background, line colour and circle colour. While others are part of the "story".

The mood is connected to the foundation structure, the sticks that stabilise the whole piece. Anything less than six lines (out of a maximum of seven) gives you Harmony, Tranquility or Calm, while the high numbers provide a good solid structure, Shelter and Sanctuary.

Concord #249 (Shelter) and Concord #92 (Sanctuary)

Honestly, what was going on for me, was imagining one of those survival shows where people build a shelter from bamboo and then cover them for leaves for protection. An entire grid of three-by-four is a Sanctuary, where the handful of three-by-three and four-by-two forms are enough for Shelter from the rain.

The number of circles and semi-circles is the Season, with the range running from sparse Winter through Autumn and Spring to bountiful Summer.

I wanted all of the features to be positive; I didn't want a good vs bad feature. So the default Tension was "Relaxed", but if you had only full circles, no semi-circles, and no single circle, then the Tension feature became "Balance".

While a single full circle gave us a Full Moon.

Concord #71 (Balance) and Concord #40 (Full Moon)

End

And all of the above is how I came to create Concord. Starting with balance, subtracting to add dynamism, then adding to restore symmetry.

Hopefully, this allows you to "read" your own Concord a little better and see the echoes of the code behind the scenes.

I apologise in advance for using the phrase "New Normal" in the blog post, also for saying "it's been a slow month" when it clearly looks like it hasn't; I'll explain after the numbers 🙂

Sales:
£40,196.13

Costs:
£16,939.42

May Profit:
£23,256.71

Overall Profit:
£50,008.63

Notes and observations

The sales are once again high, as are the costs. It's around here I'd usually explain roughly what they are, but I've going to save that for under the breakdowns because it needs a little more detail. There are three quick things I want to hit on this month which are as follows.

Focus.

A while back, I wrote a post called What are you going to do with all that money, in which I explained how it was all going to go back into improving the whole Pen Plotter part of my work, including blog posts and tutorials.

It may be evident that I haven't done that yet, and the excuse of "Well, I'm just moving offices" is getting a little thin. Well, I think I'm just about at the point where I can start focusing more on those things. This month has been all about getting organised, planning, working things out, kicking off some secret projects I can't talk about yet, getting some backend stuff on the shop sorted, and probably most importantly, working out how to hire help on the administration side.

Most of that is now in place this week, even though I've just gotten my second vax jab and feel like crap, this feels like the first week in a long time that I seem to be on top of things, just.

Just the plotter, no wages

In the profit/loss, digital and physical are getting bundled together, which, as I mentioned in a previous profit/loss, was a decision I had to make. So yes, it still feels a bit silly to go, "Oh, I spent £24.89 on paper", while there's £39,646.13 sitting there from digital sales. However, I kinda assume the digital will go away at some point, and I want to get the pen plotting into a position where it covers everything.

If I stop paying attention to the details, then I feel like I'll have lost sight of where I'm trying to get to. But for those people who want to see if making a living doing pen plotting is possible, it does bury the details a little bit.

If I strip things back to just pen plotting, having just the new studio, and remove my wages & digital, we get this.

Sales: £550
Rent: £450
P&P: £72.17
Pen, Ink & Paper: £24.89

Then I would have made £2.94 in profit, which isn't the important part. The important part is that without everything else, the sales of the pen plots still cover the cost of rent, postage and materials, just about.

I'd be selling more than just five plots in an ideal month, so the numbers still seem to show that pen plotting can cover its costs and even a small studio space.

There would be a long way to go before it could pay me a wage, but it seems not as impossible as before.

Diversifying the revenue streams

I may be a little more finance orientated (and analytical) than many artists, and I don't think that position is any better or worse than another; it just happens to be the angle I take on things.

And, I've just finished reading "Real Artists Don't Starve" by Jeff Goins, along with many other books about the business of being an artist. In there, he talks about diversifying revenue streams a lot. While it's fine to be an artist who takes the view of "I'm a watercolour landscape painter, and this is what I do", that can be hard to sustain if you make the single thing the only source of income.

Other people use their jobs to support their art, and I'm taking the position that I want my art to support me. I improve my chances of doing that if I can keep income coming in from several sources.

It's better if those are all related, and I'm a physical object, pen and ink, print artist at heart, who happens to have spent most of their life working with computer algorithms. So I am still thinking, "Does this other thing tie back to the physical art? If it doesn't, how can I make it so it does?"

Many a musician has taken on a job to afford to buy more equipment for their passion project, which isn't a bad thing.

The digital work I'm doing isn't "Oh, I'll just knock this out before I get back to the real work", but I do want to make sure that it isn't only serving to fund the pen plotter work, I want it to play a crucial role in the evolution of my whole art practice.

This is another way of saying I don't want to split things, because they are all part of the same artistic process. The fact that one earns more than the other (at the moment) doesn't make it more important artistically, but I'm also not going to ignore the fact that it's currently the one that allows everything else to happen.

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Fuller-ish expense breakdown

So, that's the expenses.

On the pen plotting and shop front, I've made the change of having free postage and packaging. It just makes the whole process easier to say, "This is how much the thing costs", and not then have to figure out the next part.

Of course, it means I eat the postage costs, but things are so much smoother now. It has me fearing the shop less and generally a lot happier. Two things help with this.

The first is that, obviously, the thing to do is increase the prices to cover that postage cost. Raising prices is something I've written about before. I think I was always underpricing, and this increase brought it in line more with other pen plotting artists, so I'm not undercutting them.

It also gives me a few different price points to play with. Many of my quick experiments are something I hadn't considered selling but are often popular on Instagram. So I feel more comfortable now just popping those into the shop at a lower price point while keeping my "proper" work at a higher value.

I still haven't achieved this yet, but the aim is to only have 16 items in the shop at a time. Then when I add a new item, the oldest item gets removed, with a nice one-in, one-out policy. Also, if a plot makes it all the way through to being removed, it obviously wasn't meant to be.

I've only managed to get nine things into the shop at the time of writing: https://shop.revdancatt.com/ and four of those have sold already. Meanwhile, I still have a bunch of plots to put into the shop, which I haven't yet, because up to this point, while making pen plots is tremendous fun, the act of putting them into the shop is mind-numbingly tedious.

Right, back to expenses.

£10k is set aside for taxes, presumably, if I spend all the money, there'll be no profit and no taxes, but I'm not entirely convinced that's how it works 😆 so here I am again playing it safe.

"AtrBlocks code uploading" is the act of getting things ready for the digital "drop".

Camera Equipment is me finally buying a whole bunch of motorised sliders and controllers for the camera. After a long time of buying cheaper solutions that just don't work while eyeing up Edelkrone stuff from a distance, I have the opportunity to buy some decent gear.

It seems like overkill for Instagram videos, but I have a feeling it'll pay for itself in the long run by just how awesome it'll make my work look 😀

The final "Misc" expense is buying a second reMarkable 2 eInk notebook. I've already written about the reMarkable here, and I love it, using it on not only on a daily basis but probably an hourly one.

Having a second one is a luxury, and I get that! My main complaint of the reMarkable was that you couldn't flip back and forth between distant pages quickly, and that's how I work all the time. I write down everything and with a paper notebook, I'd collate all the essential things by flipping back through the pages and copying things forwards.

I just couldn't do that on the reMarkable. But now I have a process of keeping the first one with me at all times and then copying over the significant bits into the "final" reMarkable at the end of the day.

The next morning, I go through the "final" reMarkable, updating the list of tasks into the "everyday carry" reMarkable. This isn't "Morning pages" from The Artist's Way or journalling, but is it close.

Again, this is an expensive luxury, but in this case, throwing money at a problem has significantly improved my quality of life and "flow".

June Sales

It's been a slow month, which seems silly to say considering, but you know what I mean. In this New Normal world of digital and physical things getting bundled together things can seem a little skewed. But this is where we are now, and I guess we have to get used to it moving forwards.

I've written about the digital NFT part before, so I'm not going to go over the background again.

This month's "drop" of my 70s Pop project was Series Two. Two hundred fifty-six different generative art pieces, the first one of which I create kicking the whole thing off. The other 255 get created one at a time when someone hits the buy button.

Each one sold for 0.095Ξ (Ethereum/ETH), which was worth $238.32 back then. ArtBlocks takes a 10% cut. The whole lot sold out in 9 minutes for a grand final total of $54,694.44 / £39,646.13.

I say the above glibly because it just sounds so bizarre. There's a whole blog post to be written later, but it's fair to say that a lot more work goes into it than "Oh yeah, I made x amount of money in nine minutes."

Selling an artwork for £173 isn't unreasonable at all for an artist. Selling 255 pieces of art in a month is possibly more unusual, but again I assume some artists manage it. So I guess everything is, umm, fine.

It was lovely to sell five plots. One right at the start of the month before I rebooted the shop. Four in the last week when I got around to putting some more plots in there.

Apparently, one of the tricks to selling art is that you have to do more than just make it; you have to put it somewhere where people can buy it too.

I also got a very nice £3 from buymeacoffee thanks, Fabax!

It's the things like buymeacoffee that really make me smile.

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I often get asked if I can use my pen plotter to plot some work for an artist. Over time I've come to the same set of requirements to make the whole process a lot easier.

Also, I love getting asked to help with these things; it's one of my reasons for getting a second plotter. The first is for my own work, the second for experiments, packaging, or running projects for other people.

So to keep it brief-ish, here are my seven main points.

1. We love SVG files, plus exporting from Illustrator (or code)

For most pen plotter artists, the easiest way of getting a design to plot is with an SVG. Not all pen plotters use SVGs; some use a thing called gcode. People with those plotters generally have a way to convert SVGs to gcode, but if they say it's too tricky, believe them rather than me.

The most common tool used by artists who want to get involved with plotters is, in my experience, Adobe Illustrator; this is fine, but also see the points below.

To export from Illustrator, pick File -> Export -> Export As...

Pick SVG (svg) from the Format dropdown, and click export.

Styling: Internal CSS
Font: SVG
Images: Preserve
Object IDs: Layer Names
Decimal: 5
Minify & Responsive both off.

If you write code create your SVG files, then we probably already love you.

2. Pens have a set width

And it's not always what it says on the pen.

The pen we use has a fixed width. If your design has lines of various thicknesses, then it's not going to work.

You get ONE STROKE THICKNESS, pick one and stick with it everywhere.

When a pen says it's 0.2mm or 0.8mm, it generally, most likely, probably isn't. Piter Pasma has an excellent way of working out the actual width but hasn't published it yet; go tell him to do so on Twitter or Instagram.

Exception: sometimes, a pen plotter (artist) will use several pens of the same type and ink colour but different thicknesses. Often when they do this, the pens are of slightly different widths themselves. Whenever you swap pens on a pen plotter machine, you risk screwing up the alignment, and this is especially hard to get right when the pens are different widths.

So while you may see some pen plotter art that uses different stroke thicknesses, it usually comes at the cost of several failed attempts. It can be done, but it's not easy.

3. Doing fills is hard

It's rather hard to get a pen plotting machine to fill in spaces because, well, you know, it's a pen with a thin nib of a single width.

STROKES ONLY, NO FILLS!

Note: when you do "trace outline" on something that looks like line art, perhaps from an old book or something, instead of getting single lines, you often get lines around the outside of the "line" you are tracing, which is then filled in in black.

When you plot this, you will get the outline but not the fill. So single lines that are traced will often turn into two very close together lines.

Remember: STROKES ONLY, NO FILLS!

Exception: you will see some pen plotter (artists) do plots with "fills". This is done by making a line or series of lines go back and forth over an area with lines set apart by roughly half the width of the pen nib. For this to work, you need to know the width of the pen nib, which you probably don't (even if you think you do).

When you get this wrong, what you see instead of a fill is a series of very tightly packed lines going back and forth.

So while you may see some pen plotter art that uses fills, it usually comes at the cost of several failed attempts. It can be done, but it's not easy.

4. You can't hide stuff

You can't hide things behind other things.

Take this design of two squares in Illustrator, one over the other, partially hiding the lines of the one underneath. This will look fine no matter how you want to get it printed unless that way is pen plotting.

The pen plotter will ignore the fill and draw the strokes; it doesn't care that one is "behind" the other.

If you want something to be not there, you have to make it not there. This is probably harder and more annoying than it looks.

5. Don't criss-cross

The more the pen crosses over its own path, the more ink it'll put down, the damper the paper will get, and the more likely it is to rip, shred or otherwise be destroyed.

This design will look fine no matter how you want to get it printed unless that way is pen plotting.

☝️ This will destroy paper ☝️

6. Put corner marks on your design

Please add tiny marks to each corner of your work. Often designs from artists kind of float around in the middle of the page. When they get exported as an SVG, all sense of scale gets thrown out of the window.

It just needs to be a tiny line (do not add a border).

This will help the pen plotter artist align the plot how they need it. They will also stick a bit of tape over each corner (I use framers tape) so the paper doesn't get marked.

7. Fonts

If you use a font, you will get an outline.

All your words will be drawn not as solid letters but rather outlines that may or may not look good depending on the font's weight; your kerning will be ruined.

You can find out more about single stroke fonts here Summary of single-line fonts, but how you use them is a different matter.

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There we have it, if you, an artist, follow the seven points above, then the chances of your plot being successful increase dramatically. Your pen plotter friend will thank you and not end up crying over an edge traced illustration from an out of copyright botany book that will take several hours to plot.

And once you've gotten the workflow down a whole new world of pens and inks and colours and techniques opens up to you. There's something magical about putting self-made ink into a fountain pen and seeing the artwork getting drawn or experimenting with brush pens on different papers.

Hopefully, this all makes that a lot smoother.

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This is the month of the "great balancing". It probably would have made more sense if this was all bundled into last month, but things were moving pretty fast then, so I guess this is where it all gets sorted out.

Last month we had sales of £50k, which made the profit look stupidly big. This month is tax and carbon offsetting, which will make the loss look a bit wild too. Hopefully, things will settle out a bit after this.

I'll put the numbers down below and then take the tax/carbon out of it, so it's easier to see what's actually happening. Here goes with the top-level numbers.

Sales:
£5,149.00

Costs:
£27,295.48

May Profit:
-£22,146.48

Overall Profit:
£26,751.92

So right off the bat, (and these numbers will be detailed below), I have two large numbers; the first is £10k set aside for tax. Up to now, I haven't been including tax in the calculations because, well, there hasn't been enough profit to really warrant it, and it's both boring and not easy.

The numbers also get a little confusing because, in reality everything is bundled in with my day job (which is working with museums and cultural orgs, helping them manage their catalogue). Still, I split it out here because the focus is on the pen, ink and selling art part. The other confusing bit is the sales of digital art is in the form of "magical sky money", the value of which appears to change on a weekly basis.

While before, it was easy to track the pounds and pence of buying some pens and paper or sticking a stamp on something and sending it to the US, it all gets a lot harder when it comes to crypto. While the hunt for an accountant who deals with crypto-art sales continues, the general "I AM NOT AN ACCOUNTANT" advice seems to be to instantly draw half down and then set that aside to cover whatever the taxes work out to be. For the moment, I'm just saying 20%, and we'll work out the details later.

The second large number is from picking three carbon offset projects from Gold Standard and using £5k on each. There is a whole blog post to be written on why carbon offsetting isn't the solution (changing the entire Ethereum system is) but is at least something while things get sorted out.

While this isn't perfect, opinions and calculations are all over the place, meaning nearly every single number I'm about to use now is up to dispute, but we'll give it a go anyway.

On average, I usually have a CO2 "footprint" of 8.5 tonnes/year. An NFT has a footprint of around 211kg, according to The carbon footprint of creating and selling an NFT artwork. You will, of course, be able to find all sorts of other figures depending on who is trying to argue that it's either "boiling the oceans" or "it's fine because it's using 'clean' electricity", we are going to assume it's somewhere between the two.

In total, I have sold 9 "Thirteen Ghosts" NFTs, one project of 256 generative art NFTs, and a second smaller project of 64 NFTs (more in a moment), making a total of 329 NFTs, or 69.42 tonnes of CO2. Just over eight times as much as I'd typically generate in a year.

The £15k worth of Gold Standard projects offset around 2,123 tonnes of CO2, making the whole thing not just carbon neutral but carbon negative by 2,053 tonnes of CO2, or 241 years of my life.

So you know, I'm trying my best.

The second smaller project of 64 NFTs, raised just over £10,000 for Women Who Code. This was done by putting their crypto-wallet address as the destination address for payments, totally bypassing me. So I could say I sold £10k worth of art and then immediately donated it away, but the reality (for tax purposes) is that I never saw that money at all.

One last final number.

Various pieces of the artwork I've sold have been resold on the secondary market, sometimes several times, for a total value of just over $70k. Because of the way (these) NFTs work, I get 5% of the secondary sales, some of which I got last month; this month's total from secondary sales was £811.

Tying it all together means in the last two months, my artwork has, in total, sold for just over £100,000.

I'm not sure where that puts me on the league table of UK artists, but I can see why art galleries and auction houses are getting more interested in NFTs and generative artists.

I think it means I can call myself a professional artist; I am now paying myself a wage after all.

Expenses time!

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Notes and observations

So obviously, the expenses are a bit extreme this month!

If we remove the Tax and Carbon, the costs would be £2,295. The bulk of this is down to me now paying myself a wage (£1,600) and still keeping the old studio on as well as the new studio as I sort my stuff out (£560).

Going a step further and also removing the digital sales, we'd have a monthly loss of £1,843.48. Clearly, the pen plots on their own are not enough to support my wages and rent. If we relied on just the pen plots, at the current rate, the remaining £26,751 would last me 14.5 months.

I decided to try to be a proper artist for a year, and we're already a month into that, with 11 months left, and most of this month has been taken up with moving the studio and admin.

Even with more hours in the week, finding time to actually art is still hard.

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Fuller-ish expense breakdown

To try and get a little more perspective on things, if we take the tax and CO2 out of the equation just for the moment, my sales would be £5,149.00, and my expenses would be £2,295.48. Giving a profit of £2,853.52 for the month.

I'm not sure my monthly report will ever get back to "normal", but I'm going to try to keep it on track as much as possible.

As you can imagine, things have still been busy, to the point that I had to hunker down in a hotel for a weekend just to sort out my to-do lists and work out what I'm supposed to be doing next. I haven't been able to do as much pen plotting as I want. I still need to get the shop set up properly again. There's a couple of other projects I can't talk about yet. While really, all I want to do is sit down and write some more code that makes the machines sing and ink flow.

What even is "normal" anymore?

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I've just, nearly-sorta-kinda, finished updating my online pen plotter tools, which has taken far too long in almost a writer's block kind of way. Having to update old code has also stopped me from writing new tools, which has been frustrating.

I only have myself to blame, though.

When I first started writing tools, some things were similar to what I wanted to do but not close enough. So, of course, writing it all myself was the way to go. I was sensible enough to know that I wanted a "framework" of sorts, code that would handle acting as a "sheet of paper", which I could add lines to in various ways, which would both display those lines on a webpage and also write them out as SVG files.

But then it did what code often does.

I wanted to make a new design, so I copied the old code into a new file and added bits, which happened again and again. This is an acceptable way to develop when you don't have a plan and don't know everything you will be doing in the future. Although not having a plan being "acceptable" is up to debate.

However, you then end up with a bunch of "technical debt", which is where I've been for the past, oooh, four months or so.

I had copied and pasted enough code, enough times, to know what I used everywhere and what only gets used now and then. I had a good idea of how I needed to cut all the code out and bundle it up into a standard external file.

The whole copy code from one place to another and accruing bloat looked something like this...

Simple project #1 becomes #2 which turns into both #3 and #4 that end up doing slightly different things. #4 then becomes #5 and #6 that bloat in different ways, while yet another copy and paste makes #7, which has some stuff that needs to be retro-fitted back into #1-#6.

Now, instead, I have my "framework" that stays pretty much as it is, "core utils" that I can add to, and then each project has it's own specific code focused on the design.

It's fair to say that going back and cutting out all the "common" bits of code from all the old tools and then smooshing them together into a uniformed chunk hasn't been fun or easy.

I also know it's still imperfect; my code is still a bit of a mash-up of an "object with methods on it, that you can call" and functions that directly manipulate lines. It is, dear reader, not a framework I'd like anyone else to have to work with.

I'm okay with that, though, as it does what I need and done is better than perfect; it allows me to make pen plots, and that's what counts.

This also means I can start moving forwards again once I've nailed a couple more things.

So, onto the changes.

The basic gist of what I wanted to do was to have some tools to crop circles and rectangles into the designs and crop designs to the circles and rectangles. Easier shown than explained.

Which is helpful for various practical purposes. Putting one plot inside another and mainly creating space to write a postal address so I can get back to making envelopes and stationery.

The second set of tools are displacement maps, which allow me to apply the Perlin noise function to the whole plot. I've shown it below with a design that has a grid, but ideally, it'll be for other things.

I can actually apply two lots of displacement noise. They allow me to have one as a general smooth displacement and a smaller one to roughen it up a bit.

Finally, a couple of things related to rotations still aren't working quite right, but at least they're not working in just one place, rather than in several different places.

And "Dotifying" throws away all the lines in a plot and keeps the endpoints.

All of this takes a while because you have to make sure all the transformations and crops happen in the correct order.

Some of the plotting tools are now slightly broken, in that the new code doesn't play nicely with putting things into different "layers", but I decided it was more important just to shove the code out there than it was to fix all the things.

I still have three more things to add, and then I can get on with my life and making new tools.

1. Pre and Post scaling. I want to be able to grow and shrink my whole design before the tool crops to the margins.
2. Line breaking. I want to be able to specify a distance, like 5mm and have all current lines broken down into 5mm sections. This is relatively easy to do; I just need to take the time to sit down and do it.
3. "Decimating". Where I can then tell the code to go along lines, randomly turning sections on and off. With the ability to slide the probability of that happening from one end of the scale to another.

Allowing me to draw a whole bunch of straight lines, break them up into smaller ones, and then have 10% of those smaller sections removed before finally applying a displacement map to the whole thing.

So that's my next step, the above three things before I get to write any more tools.

Being able to do that next step was dependant on bundling everything into a single giant block of "utilities", allowing me to add them in only one place.

I know all the above isn't that interesting, but dealing with technical debt is generally always dull. I've written the above more of a celebration to myself of getting it all done because fixing old stuff while not writing new stuff is terribly frustrating.

Well done me!

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For fun, here are some selected works from my collection of generative art from the Art Blocks platform. I highly recommend fullscreen if your 'puter can handle it.

You can see the oneline exhibition catalog here, or view the print catalog PDF.

🧑‍🎨 🧑‍🎨 🧑‍🎨

Note: This is kind of a test to see how well a gallery would work for displaying my pen plots, but I have to get them properly photographed first. And probably use a smaller gallery space.

The past few weeks, I've been trying to reduce down my to-do lists by actually doing the tasks and, more importantly, not adding new ones.

It hasn't been totally successful but not a complete failure either.

Some of the things on the to-do list sit around not being done because, in most cases, I've overcomplicated things. One example of that is my online shop; I had all these ideas about having different seasons, different collections & categories, and how I'd have a whole range of things in each.

What happened, in the end, it that I just got overwhelmed by doing anything, but at the start, I didn't know that was why. Sometimes it just takes a long while of repeatedly asking, "why am I not doing this thing?" and trying to be honest with the answers.

My new solution is to get rid of all the everything and aim to have only 16 items in the shop at a time; there's currently just eight, I think. However, now I'm feeling better about this new simple solution that I'm less overwhelmed by the task of getting the ones that have been waiting for ages sorted.

That's the theory anyway.

The aim is to now go and simplify more of my processes and beliefs. There are probably books about this, but I'm still too busy to read them. Perhaps once I've got it all done, I'll have time.

The new studio move is going well. I still don't have enough shelves; more are due to arrive from IKEA soon. So things are still at the old studio because there's no point bringing them over as there's nowhere to put them.

The NFTs thing has been interesting. I don't think I've written a Weeknotes since that went down, or at least since writing about it and adding it into my end-of-month profit/loss report.

In theory, I've made some money by selling digital art, but that money is in the form of magic-sky-money, and I have a feeling at some point it'll be a bit like this racoon trying to wash his candyfloss.

Although last Sunday I sold some more and raised £10k/$14k for Women Who Code, who very sensibly unlike the racoon above turned the sky-money into real cash ASAP. I got this lovely email from them with this in.

These funds will provide assistance to 520 WWCode members for a full year giving them technical development events and access to life-changing coding scholarships.

It's nice to be able to turn this somewhat weird moment into something useful; no matter how things end up, that above is at least a thing that definitely happened.

I get to try it all over again next month, but goodness knows how everything will be then.

Because these weeknotes don't take me long enough and I often don't find the time to do them, I decided that to do a video version that takes even longer to do was a brilliant idea — starting a weekly "vlog" over on YouTube like it's 2015 or something.

https://youtube.com/revdancatt

The main reason for doing it is that at some point, I want to make tutorials on how to do things with the pen plotter, and I would like them to be at least good.

I figured making slap-dash vlogs is a fun way of learning how to use the camera, microphones, video editing and finally, YouTube. And by doing it this way, I can get a bunch of mistakes over and done with before I start trying to make the proper ones.

It's been pretty full-on these past few weeks. I took Friday off to do a whole lot of nothing, which carried on into Saturday. I don't want to get ahead of myself, but it feels like a (UK based) holiday is something that could happen this year, but, well, you know.

This was a fun, quick project. Over on Art Blocks generative artist and creative coder Matt DesLauriers released a project called Subscapes, generating 650 different yet similar squares of land.

You can read more about Matt's project here: Subscapes (Part 1 – Preface) and here: Subscapes (Part 2 – Traits), which are both excellent reads, and I have a small primer about generative art on Art Blocks here: Generative Art with Art Blocks, a new edge.

With all that out of the way, onto the pen plotting of Subscape #433.

One of the joys of Art Blocks' "Art on the Chain" is that the code behind each project is burnt into the blockchain where anyone can see it. So, with a quick poke around, I got my hands on the code, snagged the "hash" that created Subscape #433 (which I'd decided on because I liked the river and the simple colour scheme), and smashed the two together.

I was happy to see in the code only one place using the moveTo and lineTo methods.

Meaning that if I just hijacked those lines to grab the (x, y) coordinates and stuff them all into an array, I could later use my normal pen plotting code to pull all the lines back out of that array and then plot them.

Matt very kindly also uses standard pen thicknesses to represent the different thicknesses of lines in his code. Meaning in theory, I could match the pens I was using to each of the various thicknesses in the landscape. In the end, I just grabbed two Sharpies, one "fine" and one "thin".

It's worth noting that Matt has code on github, which will output everything as an SVG anyway. But that wasn't there when I first started messing around with the code, and I also wanted to use my own UI and tools for controlling the plot.

And that very briefly is the fun I've been having with Matt's code and pen plotting; thanks to Matt for such a great project.

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Last month I said things were a month of change, so, well, yes, indeed.

We'll dive right into the numbers, and then I'll offer an explanation of sorts, I promise.

Sales:
£50,970.49

Costs:
£2,073.46

April Profit:
£48,897.03

Overall Profit:
£48,898.40

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Obviously, this is a bit of a weird one, so I've prepared a few blog posts that I'll link below.

The abridged version is that I had the opportunity to put a project onto the Art Blocks website, a place for selling generative digital art. I've generally been steering clear of the whole NFTs thing, preferring instead to stick with my pen plotting.

However, there's a lot about Art Blocks that aligns with my art, so I went for it — taking a popular pen plotting design and adapting it for digital.

The result was selling 255 pieces of digital artwork in about two hours, netting the amount detailed below.

This doesn't mean I'm switching to digital from pen plotting, in fact, far from it. The very short version is this...

I'm dropping my freelance hours to be able to spend more time on pen plotting, I've bought a second pen plotter, I've moved to a smaller but warmer and quieter art studio, I'll now have time to write and video the pen plotting tutorials I haven't had the time to make.

You can read more about the 70s Pop project here: 70s Pop Series One, probability is my paint..

More about generative art here: Generative Art with Art Blocks, a new edge.

And finally, more about my plans here: What are you going to do with all that money?.

In which all questions are answered, probably. If you still have any just drop me a line.

Now onto the expenses.

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Notes and observations

Generally, at this point, I'd talk about various expenses because that's where the fun is typically, what new pens or paper did I buy and how did it work out.

Here the most significant expense is tucked under "Misc", that's the cost involved in setting things up to sell digital art. Most of the articles you see talking about "NFTs" are about artworks that are already created that people are paying eye-watering large amounts of money for. Which also, by some accounts, can vanish at any moment.

The point of Art Blocks and generative art is that the code that creates the artwork is placed onto the blockchain by the artist. When someone buys an artwork, the transaction is also stored on the blockchain, and in return, the buyer gets a "hash". Feeding that "hash" into the code produces the artwork.

As long as the blockchain exists, the artwork can always be recreated. The means of producing the work and the token for that work are always there.

That "Misc" expense is the cost of me committing the code to the blockchain, something that thankfully only has to happen once.

The very technically inclined can see the point at which the code (and the code itself) gets put onto the blockchain here. While the Art Blocks code that does the putting lives here.

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Fuller-ish expense breakdown

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I tend not to break down sales in the same way that I break down expenses, but I will a little bit in this case.

I have two NFT projects; the first, "Thirteen Ghosts" is based on my "Ghost" plots. Typically my code generates static SVG files to send to the pen plotter. By its nature, pen plots don't animate. So I thought it'd be interesting to make a very limited edition of animated ghosts.

So far, all six standard ones have sold out, as has one of the four silver ones. When someone buys one of the works, they select a frame from the animation to be plotted, which gets sent off to them.

That project accounts for £4,451.59 of the digital sales.

The "70s Pop" project is made up of 255 artworks which all sold for a total of £43,888.39.

Finally, and most interesting to me is £2,110.51, which came from getting 5% of all sales of the "70s Pop" work on the secondary market. That the percentage of secondary market sales going to the original artist is built into the system is amazing.

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The next few months will see that total diminish as I start to count both wages and higher rent. There's no way I'm going to be selling the 40 pen plots a month needed to break even, but it seems useful to start tracking time to properly reflect how much art costs to create.

Details of which are once more covered in my post: What are you going to do with all that money?

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