👟 The Making Off Impossible Sneakers

Here is the creative process behind my first generative collection...

Hi there!

Over the past two months, I have been learning p5js and creating my first generative art collection. It is called Impossible Sneakers, and it will be open for minting around 2:30 pm CET 13.2.2022, on FxHash.

How It Started

I've had a lot of fun collecting FxHash pieces that resemble real-life objects. For example, Still Life by Orr Kislev and Fractal Marbles by Reinder Nijhoff. I started learning p5js with the idea of creating something in this direction, and I spent some time understanding lines, curves, and shapes. After some iterations, I came up with this shoe.

www.kaloh.xyz @Kaloh_nft

Played with p5js lines and curves all afternoon... Made a shoe lol #fxhash

It felt plain and boring, and adding palette variations wouldn’t make it exciting. That’s when I had the idea of creating something more abstract and landed on a semi-abstract idea. So I started to draw sketches and mock-ups of what I had in mind. The idea was to control each part independently and see what these chaotics sneakers would look like.

The Impossible Sneakers’ first mock-up. My sketching skills are not impressive as you can see 😅

Sneaker Parts

Sneaker’s Anatomy

I did some research about sneaker parts and settled for the following:

• Sole

• Body

• Inner Body

• Tip Toe

• Heer Cover

• Collar

• Laces Area

• Tongue

The algorithm creates each piece by adjusting the angles using an entropy level, so it is tough to get the same part (the same sneaker tongue shape in multiple sneakers, for example). The sneaker parts have different designs, which allowed me to have more variations and not make just one type of sneaker. Here is what the prototype looked like:

www.kaloh.xyz @Kaloh_nft

I played a bit with it and decided to go in a more "abstract" route. I changed the code a bit, so I now have control over each part of the sneaker, such as the sole, body, laces area, collar, toe cap... Included some variations and got this sketch👇

Impossible Sneaker Designs

I came up with six designs, ranging from minimal and clean sneakers to extreme and crowded sneakers. The hybrid designs mix minimal and extreme to find a middle ground.

• Minimal

• Hybrid 1

• Hybrid 2

• Hybrid 3

• Hybrid 4

• Extreme

Here is an Extreme design with the Florida Dark palette.

Palettes

I enjoyed creating the palettes and found inspiration in different elements like authentic sneakers, some NFT collections, cities, objects, etc. Here are the palette names and some of the motivations behind them:

• 'Oxygen' - Derivative from Air Jordan #1.

• 'Maya' - Derivative from Morrison’s Maya Sneaker.

• 'Mysterious Club' - Derivative from Superlative Secret Society NFT collection.

• 'Candle Light'

• 'Candle Dark'

• 'Florida Light'

• 'Florida Dark'

• 'Meteorite'

• ‘Submarine'

• ‘Clown'

• 'All Star' - Derivative from Converse All-Stars sneakers.

Here is Hybrid Maya Sneaker and the original inspiration

Edition Size and Drop

I believe the algorithm can handle a lot of variations (6 sneaker designs, 11 palettes, and the parts are always unique), but I decided to cap the edition size at 75 sneakers. I hope with that sizing, each sneaker should be very rare.

• Mint price: around 4 XTZ.

This is an entirely generative collection; I only used p5js and no image layers. You can mint one on the FxHash Tezos marketplace.

PD: Thanks to my readers’ community, especially Claus Wilke, Camille Roux, and Culla for all the feedback (and debugging support!). It was very helpful!