Solana Santa & Elf NFT

Back in the end of 2021 I took part in a two-part NFT project called Solana Santa & Elf NFT as a main character designer.

It was my responsibility to design two characters with all their variations, and in the end all the characters’ versions came to around 25,000 in total.

During the creation of the project I had some amazing fun and I also brought all my illustration and technical skills to a new level, including working with a heavly multilayared environment and making conditional logics with all the details.

I also had the chance to work in a multinational team, spread around 5 different countries.

Tools

Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop

My Role

Head of character design

What skills I used to create the project

Concept creation, character design, working in a complex multilayer environment, features export

Creative freedom

My original assignment was simple – make it original. The head of the project gave me absolute and limitless freedom to create the characters in whatever way I find suitable and as weird as I want, provided, in the end, they become one of a kind. Now, projects like that I live for. I implied my personal style to every single feature of the character’s variations so we ended up with a bunch of crazy, Christmas weirdos, intriguing, intimidating and definitely fun to visually explore.

Playing with layers

This project gave me an incredible understanding of how to work on projects involving multi-layered complexity. In order to create a character with many features and attributes, which are interchangeable, the artist has to make a lot of calculations and adjustments. Everything has to fit with everything else – every different type of hair with every body, every moth, accessory and so on. Being able to deliver a final product with all of this properly working made me not only a better artist, but also gave me the ability to organize all my projects that came after that significantly better.