Astro Girls Society is a generative collection of 8,888 unique girls (each have their own ~DNA~!) hand painted by Eleven Gua, a female artist from Shanghai who specializes in portraits of women, some of which are self-portraits.
The collection features powerful, beautiful women in a subtle floral, astral and elemental theme that ties the portraits together.
Eleven’s work was featured on the cover of INSTYLE and Marie Claire in China. Her portraits feature sharp, pronounced and angular features — hard lines blended in by soft gradients is the vibe of her incredible paintings.
We recently launched, and much to the team’s delight, Astro Girls have been blowing up on all of our timelines.
One underappreciated element of our launch is the delicate process for generating 8,888 unique Astro Girls.
How did we generate 8,888 Astro Girls?
Our collection has 450 unique traits, far more than an average ~10k generative PFP project which typically have 100–200 unique traits.
We spent months working with Eleven to draw and refine enough characteristics such that each Astro Girl will look rare.
Our first iteration started off with Eleven crafting out the base layer of the Astro Girl. We wanted the base layer to resemble her unique style of art, specifically the sharp jawline, eyes that speak to your soul, and bright, bold colors.
After multiple iterations, we finalized our base layer and this was where all the fun began. At first, we weren’t sure how many combinations of traits and attributes were common for an NFT collection.
When Eleven drew the first batch of hair and clothes, we immediately tried to generate a small collection of 500. We observed that all the generated photos looked largely similar, with common overlap in colors and strokes. Met with our first obstacle, we figured that we needed to think through the generative process more deeply and conducted market research.
This was the result of our first batch of girls. We’re getting somewhere!
After building the initial base, we then proceeded to design the rest of the collection.
Every single feature from her hair, eyeshadow, face art, tattoos, clothes, backgrounds needed to be perfectly matched so that every girl is picture-perfect.
Proof of Taste
Our community came forward and hosted a “mood-board” session a month ago. They pitched in ideas and style inspiration which helped us improve and build upon what we had so far. As you can see, this mood-board inspired a handful of traits in our final Astro Girls.
The final artwork is ultimately a product of community efforts, coining the term “proof of taste”
Incompatible Logic
The trickiest part about putting each trait in the mixer is our worry that some things will not mix and match with one another.
After running through our generative code the first few times, we were stunned by the output of Eleven’s amazing artwork.
However, we found that plenty of the attributes were incompatible with one another, causing a clash in colors, prints, and sometimes a few different accessories stacked up with one another. As a collection focused on high fashion and style, we needed to make sure the styling is compatible with each other.
We needed to add logic around the incompatible traits, so the styling of each girl remains consistent with her own style.
After compiling and renaming the list of backgrounds and attributes respectively, we decided to segregate the attributes based on a few factors:
- The colors primarily needed a contrast between background and foreground
- Each of the girls needed to look distinct without appearing too “messy”
- The colors needed to complement each other
- Styles of necklaces and earrings needed to complement the other clothes the girl was wearing–effectively a style check.
- Foreground and background color and style cannot be the same color, with the exception of a few hairstyles and colors.
- Eyeshadows, lips and hairs needed to be compatible with the girls’ skin color and eye shadow.
Yes, with 450+ traits, you can imagine this was an exhausting process.
An example of some of the incompatible traits that we encoded when generating the collection and its metadata.
We did our first test run after categorizing each background with each of the attributes based on compatibility — it started to look more put-together and the colors & attributes greatly complement one another.
Compare the above to these in our semi-final version — much more high contrast, fleshed out.
These are so much cleaner; colors complement each trait well in every single aspect. Every single detail from the eyeshadow to each accessory is consistent in coloring yet looks rare for each girl.
Clean af.
Naming the Astro Girls
Naming each of our girls was like the cherry on top for our collection.
We added the names of the sun signs, astral terms, and adjectives that represented the free-flowing, yet fierce nature of the Astro Girls.
The team brainstormed and added 200 adjectives & nouns each in order to start generating the combination of names.
That generated the first set of names.
We thought the generator would give us a complete set of 8,888 words until we started reviewing the list. We quickly realised that we had to manually go through each one to remove the ones that didn’t sound quite right. The team divided and conquered — removing and fine tuning the list of names. Here’s a snip of our team conversation the night we filtered through this list.
After hours of fine tuning and regenerating words, we finally ended up with our list of names for our Astro Girls.
The Reveal
We witnessed the full product and naming of the Astro Girls come to life when we uploaded the metadata and generated our first revealed Astro Girl via OpenSea in beta version — and there we have, the birth of our very first Astro Girl on testnet — warm and loving mercury.
When people talk about launching NFT collections, they often pinpoint the community, smart contracts, gas optimization, and all others. While all these factors are just as important, the artwork itself is an incredibly complex process that people often under-look.
The evolution of the Astro Girl was a product of hard work, dedication and iterations and we’re so excited to share this space with you.
This is just the start of an exciting chapter ahead with our lovely Astro Girls.
Our public sale is still live and you can still mint your gorgeous, gorgeous Astro Girls here: https://mint.astrogirls.wtf/.
