So… It’s a week until Halloween, and ‘Day of the Dog’ goes live this evening.

It started a few weeks ago when I thought I could do a Christmas Hat and Skull version of ‘Good Dog’ as a little seasonal fun. Maybe 64 editions as it’s a redo, with some added extras.

Be careful what you wish for!

This ended up being the biggest project to date, eating the most time and creating something wonderful (in my opinion) so worth every hour.

‘Day of the Dog’ has over 2500 lines of code to create the spooky Labradors, (Good Dog was a trim 1400) It is fully code generated and every stroke is painstakingly ‘drawn’ in Beziers. I’ve gotten quite good at just ‘knowing’ what numbers to pump in. Sometimes I draw a little control circle to orientate myself – esp. as for this one I have lots of rotated parts.

They are drawn on a render independent grid co-ordinate system which allows endless scaling. I’ve added an experimental 16K download – but it breaks most computers. – maybe I should learn SVG!!!

As ever, my trust iPad and Pencil were my friends along with google images and frankly my main cultural reference for Day of the Dead, Pixar’s ‘Coco’! Hey I’m from the UK, we barely have Halloween, and that film made me cry, on a plane.

I started with a standing dog, and close up – these took A LONG time, and I had to scrap the first versions and refactor how I was creating them. Once I had a system set up it made things a little easier – but trial and error are required. In good dog, It’s fairly easy to make it look like a expressive dog. With a skeleton its much harder, and you need to simplify the structures, from both an aesthetics point of view and sanity. This means it retains the ‘street art’ graphic style of ‘Good Dog’ but isn’t anatomically correct – though I did study dog skeletons in the process.

Like Coco, the skull is nothing like a real dog’s skull as that wouldn’t be as fun and expressive.

I then set about new backgrounds, one uses the ‘ink’ line functions from ‘Spare us the blotter’, some are from ‘Good Dog’ but in more Halloween greys, or with decay and ‘blood’

But the one I most wanted to add was some dynamic ‘Marigolds’, this too proved to be a rabbit hole of delight – and theres 3 different types of marigold backgrounds – the dynamic strands, the circles and the blooms. I love these and they are set on a twilight sky backdrop.

Next up I tried a sleeping dog – this took FOREVER and about 3 layouts, I’m happy with the end results. But it caused a stall in the process and when it was all just not looking right I nearly gave up.

Wouldn’t it be cool if I just added….

Then the endless journey to minting continued. I didn’t want to do the 2x and 3x poses I had in ‘Good Dog’ because the bones all bet a bit messy overlaid. So I had the bright idea to do a homage to the ‘3 wolves’ meme t-shirt.

I wanted to do something with the ‘painted faces’ of the skulls – but this did seem a little overwhelming – and it took some time but I managed to create a pleasing pattern that can appear over the skulls.

Finally I completed a Sitting and ‘play dead’ variation. Before spending a day or so testing, testing, testing.

I say…. Finally…. But I missed the publishing deadline on Saturday, so I added one final ‘Cempazúchitl Crown’ variation with a returning ‘Good Dog’ Labrador, suffering the fancy dress!!!

And that’s ‘Day of the Dog’ hopefully bringing some spooky joy to fxhash.

Mac

sub-note - the original has an issue on iPhone 12 live view, so I reissued with a fix and those that bought the OG one will get the corresponding mint airdropped.

Peace!

Some images from the journey.