Americaan Gotchi

 

Americaan Gotchi is a piece that closest represents what my animation style is(found here). Thick lines with masks that reveal localized animations, typically stop motion sometimes 'treated' video clips. The majority of my Fake Gotchis have been pixel based animations, this is a reprieve from that. 

The Concept:

The idea came to me one night as I was smoking and watching the stars outside of my apartment. I was thinking really hard about the Gotchi Lisa and what other famous painting could make a similar transition into the Fake Gotchi's Collection. 

Americaan Gotchi hit my all at once, especially once you realize that we have pitchforks already in the universe, that gothic to gotchi is just rearranging the letters. It felt natural.

The Process:

American Gothic is an impressive work of art and I wanted an equally impressive Fake. 

I knew it had to be IRL painting of some type, so I fell back on the stop motion paintings I had made for my music videos and personal art. I had done acrylic stop motion paintings in the past and had always wanted to try one with water colors. I actually had an NFT I wanted to make on WAX that utilized this technique and I thought this would be a perfect dry run.

                                             (a stop motion painting from a 2012 music video I made)

To understand how this piece was made, how any of my pieces are made; You need to envision the FINAL product and work backwards on the best way to achieve the affect. 

Once you realize the path, you need to set the rules and contraints. So I knew a few things to be true about this piece before I started planning it:

1. Each piece needed to both be created separately but also match in resolution and color, because they would all be combined in a compositor program at the end. (meaning they all had to be made with same paints, lights, camera angles, etc)

2. The end result would be watercolor bleeds in reverse, washing color over the shapes. (which is why each piece needed to be separate, you can only animate watercolors one section at a time, without it getting sloppy)

3. The watercolor NEVER defines the shape, it needs to bleed and be free. Hard, animated lines would both define shape and provide a path to place/hide our mask cuts. And pencil lines.

Knowing all this, I realized the process would need to be almost an assembly line style of production. So everything matched (Camera Angles, Sizes, Colors, Ratio)

I compose everything I do in photoshop first as a mock up(but it gets physically drawn first before it gets to that point), to get the proportions and positioning correct. In this instance, each element was then isolated and printed out on paper.

ORDER: Sketch > Photoshop Composite > Printed out > Light table (hard lines, watercolor) > Painting > Film Watercolor Bleeds > Process Film (reverse and sped up) > Matte Cut and composite with hard lines > Process for final.

That paper was then taped to my light board and for each element I needed it both on watercolor paper and also the hard outlines on tracing paper. The hard outlines would be animated to lend more "kinetic energy" to the piece. Alignment squares were drawn on each piece to help line up later. 

Once I had all my lines drawn, I needed to get ready to film the painting. This would be a few hours setup during which the camera could not move, so I fixed it to my desk 3 feet above looking straight down. There were also braces for where the paintings would go on the desk. 

The way it works was for each element I would fully paint it out in watercolors, then I would run the film camera in 4k while I poured water and paint over the piece and cause bleeds. The end result would leave each piece ruined, which felt apropos: That in destroying the physical you create the digital. 

So with 2 minutes for each element, I loaded them into Abode Premier, reversed and sped up the clips and picked the parts of the bleed animations I wanted to feature.

Then I needed to isolate the hard lines and animate them also.

Once both pieces were ready(water bleeds and hard line animations) I assembled them in After Effects.

The watercolor layers were masked and the hard line animation covered the mask cuts and also lent a uniformity to the overall piece. 

The stars were actually just black paint splotches on white paper, I just reversed the color and added the night sky under it. The night sky was a page that I covered in all black and blue paint and poured water over to get bleed animations. In AE, I bumped the color down so far that it's hard to see the animation but it's there. In fact I think it's subtleness is perfect, as it doesn't detract from the foreground. 

Everything in this painting moves and there's always something to watch. I'm extremely happy with how the community has reacted to it.

The Supply and Sale: 

Everything I do is maximum effort, some pieces require more attention and detail than others. This one fit into the latter category. 

I wanted a very low mint for this piece. Mainly to keep it a highly valued collectible. 

It sold well and a small number were held back to be raffled to holders of the utility NFTs, which is the sort of intermingling I want people to realize about my Fake Gotchis; That my NFTs are interconnected, by holding a high number mint of something, you have a small chance to win something with a low mint number.

Additional Notes:

I decided to call this NFT an "Art NFT", not because my other pieces aren't 'art' but because this was the first piece that didn't have utility tied to it. I do want an avenue to release small batch NFTs without the headache of whitelisting and raffles, yada yada. Once the Utility NFTs are all released, I will have a hard enough time keeping up with them and it feels good to have pieces out there that I know I don't have to constantly compare holders of against my own whitelist documents.

There will be more "Art NFTs", some will feature watercolor again but I use a lot of different animation techniques and you will see some very interesting stuff in the future.