The Spring Dragon
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Quasi Dragon Studies pre-mint outputs of the Composite Builder
The Dragons that never were
These are not actual Dragons. They were created by joining dummy tiles together in the Composite Builder before launch of Harvey Rayner's official Quasi Dragon Studies collection tiles. Once launch went live, all dummy tiles available on Verse were replaced with new ones for the final QDS tile collection. And the saved composites resulted from everyone who played with the Builder up to that point, remained unminted.
These are some of my pre-mint saved composites. They will not have a home in the final , but they will be immortalized here for Deca eternity.
The Flower Dragon
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How it works
Quasi Dragon Studies is an art experiment in community co-creation. Collectors are an integral part of the creative process with a final say in how each final piece turns out.
In this project, collectors mint art tiles with randomly assigned edge properties that enable them to be joined together to create new artworks using a tool called the Composite Builder. There are no limitations on the number of tiles one can mint, allowing for endless creative possibilities. At the same time, some fantastic composites can be created by using a single tile, completed by blanks.
Collectors can choose to participate in the project in two ways:
THE DRAGON KING
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The Dragon King is a great example (as is the Flower Dragon above) of how a single tile surrounded by blanks can generate spectacular outcomes. One of my favorite composites.
THE BLACK DRAGONS
The grails of the collection - there are only 50 Black Dragon and 5 White Dragon possible configurations. Once a particular configuration of a Black or White Dragon has been minted, that particular configuration will no longer be available to mint as a Black or White Dragon, even if your tiles would have otherwise qualified to mint either one of them. See configuration sets here
Harvey Rayner is an English artist and creative coder with over 25 years of digital and generative art practice.
He studied at The City and Guilds of London Art School and has had a diverse creative career working as a designer, inventor, programmer, and business owner all while maintaining a dedicated daily art practice.
Harvey's extensive body of work showcases an evolution in his formalized geometric approaches to art creation. In recent times, he has deeply embraced the Long Form Generative art approach, utilizing randomness as a means to explore dynamic composition, deep texture, and generative color. Rayner has also demonstrated a desire and ability to innovate how artwork is developed and minted through community co-creation experiments. He has become an active member of the generative art community and has written many aiming to demystify generative art for collectors approaching Web3 from the Gallery art world.
THE ARTIST
These are The Dragons That Never Were.
Treat the Composite Builder as a creative playground with the incentive of making the most visually compelling composites and be led by their own artistic instincts.
Build composites with strict joining rules, invest time, energy and money to collect specific tiles and create hard-to-make limited edition Black and White Dragons. The incentive here being creating quantifiable rarity which has become a significant feature of Web 3 art.
Throughout his journey, Harvey has been heavily influenced by mathematics and geometry, which have gradually become the foundation for the co-creative process. The motives behind incorporating dragon imagery and Eastern aesthetics can be traced back to Harvey's profound encounters with Buddhism and its impact on his artistic inspiration.