Sketchy Mfers 🎧👀

As we prepare to launch Sketchy Mfers, I’d like to give you a little history about how they came about…

introducing: sketchy mfers
introducing: sketchy mfers

On January 29th, 2022, sartoshi minted mfers - early sketches, some initial sketches drawn in the fall of 2021 that lead to the mfers collection we know today. Among them, one of them popped out at me. It had raw lines, an oval head, and big bug eyes:

mfers - early sketches
mfers - early sketches

A few days later, I re-drew it myself for the first time:

mfer #2118 as the very first sketchy mfer
mfer #2118 as the very first sketchy mfer

The response was overwhelming. Many mfers reached out and urged me to make my own collection. The mfers community was still growing at the time, and there were only a handful of derivatives back then, like Mfers Ahead and 3Dmfers. And to be honest, I was unsure I could reach the level of artistic realization that they had. So I quietly put the idea in the back of my mind and kept drawing. Kept playing around with the sketchy mfer. I tried new traits and posted them, and went back and refined them even more. It was a great thing to do on cold winter Sundays at a cafe. And it helped keep my ever so busy mind a little more quiet.

mfer #2118 sketchy mfer final version
mfer #2118 sketchy mfer final version

Then, @zhoug0x reached out to me. He’d been watching sketchy mfers and said if I ever needed any help with it, to let him know. I had seen him around everywhere in the mfers Twittersphere. He was the unofficial coder for the mfers community, and eventually working his way up to becoming one of the signers for the @unofficialmfers treasury. He was passionate, involved, and kind. And I knew his message meant I needed to start realizing sketchy mfers beyond my iPad.

As an artist, everything for me is a question. And the question was: what if sartoshi chose this sketchy mfer from his early drawings instead on the one we know today? What would it look like? How would it feel? The question burned and quickly turned into desire. I had to know what it would look like for every single original mfer trait to be adapted to this sketchy mfer. Not just copy-and-pasted over, but fully redesigned from the ground up. So I decided: this is my mfer now, and I’m responsible for showing mfers — in some sort of alternate web3 reality way — what this sketchy mfer would look like if it were chosen.

So I put my head down and drew. Every so often I would hop onto Spaces, dm other mfers. The community was always there for me as I built with their feedback and encouragement — mfers take care of mfers.

In the middle of the project, I brought on @sodasoondae, an artist I admire not only for her sense of humor, but her personality. She’s talented, organized, and absolutely relentless when it comes to details. She saw behind the sketchy mfer, around every part of its boney body. She also has a strong sense of light, direction, and motion that added so much depth to each trait. Together, the process was always the same. We would design and simplify and distill and refine until each item was perfect. With every single trait we asked ourselves: is this want-able? We wouldn’t rest until they were. If you were to divide the amount of hours we put into the art as a whole by each line, every single stroke has about 2 hours of work inside it.

We made this sketchy mfer for you, and we wanted you to feel absolutely proud using it.

What’s beautiful about NFTs is the code becomes part of the art. There’s so much behind the curtain that @zhoug0x built. It’s easy to forget in NFTs nowadays, but your interaction with the contract is part of the art too. Speaking of his contract: it’s a beast. It has been battle tested to ensure smooth transactions, along with some magical developer wizardry to help lower gas fees, even upon batch mints. He also designed our website to ensure maximum security between our front end and the contract. Safety was a huge discussion when building sketchy mfers, and no one does it better than @zhoug0x.

Making an NFT collection is hard work, and I couldn’t of asked for a better team.

two months later..
two months later..

We have so much to be thankful for. Shout out to sartoshi for allowing us to use one of his early sketches as the basis for this project. And countless other mfers who’ve helped put their eyes on the art and encouraged us along the way.

We hope you truly enjoy your sketchy mfers!

Made by,
@jellopeas, @sodasoondae, and @zhoug0x

Subscribe to jellopeas
Receive the latest updates directly to your inbox.
Mint this entry as an NFT to add it to your collection.
Verification
This entry has been permanently stored onchain and signed by its creator.