NFT collection on the XRPL
tessera, /ˈtɛs(ə)rə/ noun, plural tes·ser·ae
a small block of stone or other material used in the construction of a mosaic
Tessera NFTs are created using small pieces of vintage children’s bookcovers.
Every tile is a 1:1 digital version of a real piece of bookcover that has previously been used in one of my handcrafted mosaics.
For over a decade I have digitally scanned and stored these little tiles in a database that has grown to over 75.000 ‘pixels’. Each tile is inextricably linked to a unique piece of bookcover once incorporated in a real work of art.
Generative collection
From januari 2024 I started working on a second generative collection besides daily drops of Tessera Genesis.
On a canvas of 26 x 26 tiles I started working on 26 sets of clothing + headwear in combination with 8 body types.
Each Tessera II NFT is build up of maximum 7 layers (traits) like ‘background’, ‘body’, ‘clothing’ and ‘headwear’.
For a small number of NFTs ~26 I manually selected combinations to have at least one full set of each clothing-headwear present.
For ~2600 pieces I used dedicated software to randomly mix all layers using rarity where certain traits like ‘crown’ were more rare than ‘baseball cap’.
The project was launched for open mint on xrp.cafe where everyone could buy a piece without knowing in advance which of the random NFTs would be offered.
Each tile in an NFT is inextricably linked to a unique piece of bookcover once incorporated in a real work of art.
Artist
I’m an artist for almost 25 years now, graduated from art school in 2000 (Fine arts, Minerva). I founded my own studio in 2007 focusing mainly on visual and graphic design and furniture design. I started creating mosaics from recycled children’s book covers in 2009, after having used book covers als base material in a range of furniture designs.
My IRL mosaics are handmade one-offs, both commissioned and free work, and are most often put up for sale in galleries and at art fairs. For each handcrafted mosaic I need ±2000 small tiles from real children’s book covers to choose from. These small tiles are handcut and physically filed and subsequently digitally catalogued. Over the course of the last decade I have garnered up to 75.000 small digital files of unique colorful ‘pixels’ of real world pieces of book cover that are inextricably linked to handmade works of art.