End of Summer '24

 

I sometimes forget I have this blog page while life keeps distracting me constantly. But indeed this was a fun summer, I went to Europe once again and finally stepped in Scandinavia for the first time. Lovely Norwegian fjords, castles in Copenhagen and Swedish meatballs, what a pleasure. I'm now back to NYC waiting for the cold weather to arrive, or not waiting but it's unstoppable.

This week I'll be doing a new Pancakes and Booze event, my third one actually and will conclude my art events for the year. I did enjoy doing two events at Green Point Gallery, even though it was a bit hard to arrive to the place. Hopefully I get to find a few new places next year to display my art and maybe sell some.

I have a few more trips before the end of the year but I hope I manage to make time to draw a bit more. The amount of art pieces made this year is not big, but I hope the quality gets better. I'm also searching for a new series to make, since the Fruits & Veggies was so much fun.

Not much more to add, I'll see you all soon ##

The 2024 art extravaganza

 

Well hi! Right after the crazy end of year with the Fruits & Veggies Series (where I ended up making 36 of them and I'm now planning prints for upcoming shows), I went on a two month trip to my home country of Argentina. There was no new content in this lapse, for which I'm a bit ashamed of but there was really no good time to sit down and draw.

I'm now back and the proper planning for the year has started. So far I will be attending two art shows -- one at Green Point Gallery and a new Pancakes and Booze in the coming weeks, both in Brooklyn, NY. Hopefully I get to bring new content for the second one, since I'm planning to get the Fruits series printed out soon. On that note, people seem to have loved the series and it may be a great idea to do a new one later this year.

Another idea I have been brewing is creating yet another coloring book and maybe a comic series, but that's yet to be decided.

On the NFT side, the project has not really caught much traction so it will still be there on the site, but I have just released a new homepage that removes the NFT focus. I'm back to displaying simpler content, with a link to the new Fruits series and the latest artworks uploaded. I may go back to NFTs one day, but unfortunately the craze is long gone and I have no idea how to catch traction on new users. This has been a lot of work with little results, but I'm glad about the project regardless since it's been an awesome experience. Maybe by creating more art and improving the website, it will start moving again one day.

Thanks for being there!

-Andres

Fruits & Veggies Series

Hello internet! Unfortunately I was not able to attend my second Pancakes and Booze art show this September due to horrible weather that day and the fact that it was being done outside. I arrived at the place and as they were setting up an outdoor tent, I decided to not attend that day since it was pouring rain like crazy. Sorry :|

As of today, the new Fruits & Veggies series is up on my website. This just randomly started after a friend saw the initial Tomato drawing and asked if I was making a fruit series. Then I realized a tomato can simultaneously be both a fruit and a veggie, therefore I continued with vegetables too. I will be adding a few more in the coming weeks so stay tuned!

Looney World NFTs + 1st Art Fair

 

I often forget to post updates here, but that's because most of my updates these days occur over Twitter. Anyhow, it's been an epic 2023 so far:

In March I released my first official series of NFTs called Looney World NFT. This was an interesting experiment and indeed it took long hours, days and weeks to get everything ready. The hardest part was getting the website Metamask logging and furthermore displaying the NFTs on the site. I have to say this was probably the biggest blocker. The actual creation of setup and blockchain handling of the NFTs happened over AutoMinter, a tool a highly recommend if you ever work on your own NFT project. Finally, the social media and community engagement was as always quite rough. I was well aware I was releasing an NFT collection during a massive NFT bear market, but I still had a lot of fun. The Discord channel is still alive, although not very active. The channel has mainly become a way of keeping the community up to date, but not much more unfortunately. I will keep working on the collection, there are a few web updates coming up and I'm planning on releasing exclusive content only for NFT holders. A Looney World NFT Series 2 may be on the horizon, probably for 2024.

On another note, I will be finally exposing and selling my art at an art fair / event called "Pancakes and Booze". This will occur on July 20 in Brooklyn, NY and I am getting ready by setting up prints, books, trading cards and more! I'm really looking forward to my first in person art event :)

Finally, as always I've been uploading new artwork to both Instagram and my website, trying out a few new things and enjoying myself.

Hope you all have a great summer, take care of yourself!

Big web updates

 

Welcome to 2023! It has certainly been a long time, but here I am once again. I took a nice long break in December, went to Europe for 3 weeks and had a real blast. As always, the thing I missed the most was making art, so once I got back I went straight into my hobby.

Here is a list of everything going on at the moment:

• NFT project: The project is ready for launch and will drop an exclusive post here about it soon. The mint is set for launch through Autominter and I'm aiming for end of February / beginning of March. However, I'm trying to set a community on Discord and there is an Alphabot running to sign-up. Depending on how many people have signed up, I may extend the date by a few more weeks but no more than that. Regardless of the reception, this will just be the beginning and new collections may follow.
• Server side rendering: The site has always suffered from SEO problems. To be honest, the Google search visitors have always been low. The main reason was easy: Links across the site were not easy to discover and I never had server side rendering. For the past week, I spent a considerable amount of hours setting SSR to run on my site and finally achieved it. This together with an automated sitemap.xml will hopefully bring a lot of SEO enhancements. The first page to load (you can test it by hitting Refresh on any site) will now be super fast since all the content is returned straight from the server -- no more waiting spinner on the first load.
• Grid view page: This new page (see image above) has the purpose to also help on SEO. The artwork collection pages (digital and ink) which have had an on-demand infinite scroller since forever, even though they got amazing performance for the user, they were really hurting the search engines crawlers. These new pages (see all digital and all ink) will for sure help out finding content across the site.
• New artworks: As always, the latest artworks are found on my Instagram page. I have yet to do a big content update on the site, which will probably come some time today or tomorrow. Because of the NFT project, the amount of digital drawings last year was huge! Expect a big update on the site :)

Til next time!

NFT collection!

 Hello fellow followers! Once again reporting here after a few months. I hope everyone is doing alright in this crazy world we are living in.

For the last few months I have been deeply focused on the comeback of digital artworks and got around digitalizing a bunch of previously created inky drawings. I've really enjoyed doing that, together with creating brand new artworks. The goal is not only that, I have also been gathering the best digital artworks from the last few years and making a brand new NFT collection that I'm hoping to release in the near future.

The NFT collection will consist of 50 NFTs with multiple editions each. They will all look similar to collectible stickers, with a name and an assigned number. Of course, owning these will bring benefits such as airdrops of new NFTs in the future and possibly a printed version of the cards. For the time being, I'm just working out the details and figuring out how to start an NFT community to get traction on this project. If you would like to be part of this, please reach out to me on Instagram! @okcerk

Meanwhile, I'll be enjoying my first fall here in NYC! Stay safe!

Long time ago in a galaxy far far away

Well it's been indeed a while and life has been hectic! Back in November I decided to leave everything behind and go spend some time in Europe with no real plan whatsoever. Well that turned into this great 4-month adventure throughout Portugal, Spain, Canary Islands, Italy, Switzerland and Paris. Indeed one of the greatest (if not THE greatest) trip I've ever done. The photo above is from a Keith Haring exposition in Pisa, Italy.

But this meant I had no access to my dear Wacom tablet, or a proper computer setup to keep working on digital artworks. That's why everything you see on my IG page -- which is the most up to date spot for my artworks -- has been ink artworks. I'm now back to America, trying to sort out my life in the next few months and as soon as I'm settled again, I'll be back to the digital world.

One thing I have realized is that even though it's been years since I purchased my Wacom tablet, hand-drawing on paper is still what suits me the most. I have a few ideas on my mind regarding what's coming next: a site refresh probably to display multiple tiles on each section, finishing up the final episode of Escuadron 37 and coming up with new NFT and drawing projects.

Andres