Last year, I was introduced to NFTs through a couple friends and decided to jump right in. A popular trend in NFTs is the Profile Picture NFT aka PFPs. There is a really good article that explains PFPs in a nutshell that you can read here. PFPs are basically avatars that are digitally generated from a certain number of traits to make a collection of thousands of characters, the two most famous PFP collections are CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club. I wanted to create my own PFP collection, but I wanted to do it differently. Instead of thousands of randomly generated characters all pulling from the same pool of traits, I chose to hand-draw each and every NFT.
The concept I chose to develop was called Head of House. Taking inspiration from some unused sketches (see below) that I did for the Kes’ We Home album art, I thought it would be a fun idea to pair up architecture with the PFP concept. That meant that I would be personifying these buildings and giving them personality. Some of the earlier versions had eyes and a little more human-like traits, but I decided to keep it simple. The only one where you can see remnants of that is the Miami Head of House in the image above where I thought it would be fun to keep the sunglasses.
With the nature of the collection, being all hand drawn…it was impossible to release a mass amount of pieces into the collection in one go, so I decided it would be best to drop 10 pieces to start with and then work on more drops as the first 10 sold. The first 10 were dropped December 16th, 2021, and by the end of 2021, I had minted 21 pieces.
Since the start of 2022, and at the time of writing this article, I have created a further 15 pieces including a mini-series of the Magnificent 7 buildings in Trinidad. The Magnificent 7 are 7 of the most stunning examples of architecture in the Caribbean, and also some of the most artistically rendered buildings in Trinidad & Tobago. They are also all on one street around the Queen’s Park Savannah. These pieces all sold out on the day of their release, with the penultimate piece, Queen’s Royal College (QRC) selling at auction for 1.3 ETH (at the time of the sale, it was my all time highest art sale.)
Once all the Magnificent 7 pieces were sold, I did an airdrop to all holders of a Twitter Banner with a landscape including all Magnificent 7 illustrations. There are currently two of these banners available on the secondary market which you can see by clicking here. These pieces were my most ambitious Head of House illustrations, and some of them took as long as 15 hours to illustrate. A true difference to regular PFP projects where algorithms create pieces using pre-created elements.
After the release of the Magnificent 7 pieces, I started work on the next drop. These 4 new pieces were a mix of concepts…one is the diner from Seinfeld and another is the Chrysler building in NYC…these 2 were done to pay homage for my first NFT NYC visit. The other two pieces rounding up the new drop were the Boissierre House aka The Gingerbread House (timelapse above) and Knowsley House…two famous architectural examples from Trinidad and Tobago.
Head of House has truly been a labour of love so far. It is one of the very first collections to be released from Trinidad & Tobago (and the wider Caribbean), it is also unique because each piece is individually hand-drawn making them all true one-of-ones. My goal for this collection is for it to have historic value later down the line because of these reasons. As a creator, one of my greatest muses is my home country of Trinidad & Tobago, and this collection definitely speaks to that as almost 2/3 of the pieces are based on architecture from T&T.
