FxApes: how i made it

The love for drawing monkeys actually hit me way earlier than i even discovered fxHash. In march 2021, me and a few other peeps were looking at making some new comics books that could have been fitting for the NFT space, and there was a lot of talk about commercial rights given to holders and the future developments when these collections would have become, hopefully, estabilished brands. BAYC had finished minting not long before and the community was going at insane speed, so we picked them for our main characters along with Hashmasks. From that point on i drew apes almost daily for a few months, as the comic took long to get to publishing (some of which i have been unfortunately sick and not able to work properly with the right hand), and against all my expectations had a blast with it! i am not sure to this day why i find these so funny to do- might be my avversion to drawing human faces (incredibly boring, pun not intended), the drawing style i developed when approaching this specific comic or else, but to this day they climbed the ranks of my favourite things to draw up there with monsters and sci-fi stuff.

some of the first sketches of apes i ever made, somewhere in march 2021

Fastforward to -i think- december 2021, i had found out about fx since early november and was an enthusiastically trigger-happy abitual monkey in the community, community that i really tought would have HATED something like an ape derivative... until Gen DOS Punks came out. everyone had fun with them, people used them as pfps and in general no one seemed threwn off by the derivative kind of thing. On top of that, i had seen for months people praise not exactly great pfp art (not the ones you like tho, those are all great... the other ones) and there was a little voice in the back of my head telling me "man, you could do that stuff better if you could leave comics alone for 5 minutes". So i just threw the idea in chat and nicthib popped up immediately saying he would have been down for it, the first connection between apes and fx came to mind about a rgb skin to give a resemblance of the trippy and things started rolling.

I had trouble finding an head that felt different enough by keeping similar proportions so i just drew my own version of a monkey with very different "weights"- fxApes are consistently different from the BAYCs i drew in metawanderers

So now we had the ideas and enough skills between me and nicthib to get the whole thing done, and it went pretty straightforward- i spent most of january on them and towards the end of that month we had a lot of the art done and the code was running, so it was time to get in touch with the artists we decided to homage to be sure they would have been okay with it. You might ask yourself why i didn't contact them beforehand instead than risking to have a lot of work already done discarded- there was indeed a reason, as i felt that showing them the actual drawings would have been better as they could have already seen the final work- for the good and the bad of it- and decide based on something concrete. This phase went incredibly well! it's here that Mark jumped on board- i contacted him to ask if we could use smolskulls and he suggested to put the code and have them done in a properly generative way which was mind blowing- i was very happy that the apes could timidly step a foot in the properly generative area and with nothing less than smolskulls on them. he didn't even stop there and coded gradients (starting plan was to have a gradient bg but it would have been one and ofc a .png asset), rainbows, multiple color palettes for single traits and the full window view when opened in fullscreen. To my surprise almost everyone else was either ok or even happy to have the traits included, as i expected a good % of rejections instead. we still had a couple of traits that didn't make it, which i'm sad about but they left space for new traits instead. There was also a Fidenza fur called "new 'denza" and a .png background called "gradienza" but no one had the guts to ask permission to Tyler Hobbs to draw his stuff over some cartoon ape, so that was just straight down skipped.

Now the story almost ended, everything was ready , we were supposed to mint at the end of a cycle to leave the project open three hours later and... nobody told me that the sample images were to be added though the hash, so i ended up missing the mint window while i was hunting for some decent previews. We delayed 1 cycle + three hours (as i wasn't verified), and it wasn't the only fuck up of the day, as after mint i learned that i also gave Zancan the wrong name in the description. Pretty dumb, uh? i blame it on sleep deprivation. However i would not mention any of this if they didn't bring two of my favourite things about this project:

1) By checking random hashes on the closing line of the mint window i got one of the most meta roll i could have ever gotten: a blue monkey with a fez and a waiting to be signed t-shirt, like my own beloved chimp getting into the merch for the mint. Of course i used this as first sample image of the project.

2) An idea for the post sold-out airdrop with the errata corrige for Zancan's name, one of my favourite pieces done lately. I added here a not seen before version without the coloring, just ballpoint pen on random fabriano paper- the rest was all digital.

I won't talk much about the postmint if not to say thank you for all who participated, fomoed in, liked, emoji bombed on sales, put as pfp and even flipped the apes- it was a glorious chaos incredible to witness for me and honestly seeing all the people "wearing" them has been one of the most satisfying moments of my artistic career. Words can't express enough how happy i am about it to this day.

Thank you all!