Most of my art in Cryptopop.net in 2017 was heavily influenced by the fervor around the growing price, but all good things eventually come to an end … especially when it comes to price rallies. In the final days of the year, the markets were starting to slow, and for me at least, creating illustrations about the price was starting to feel a bit old hat.
I capped off 2017 by debuting a set of 10 portraits of industry leaders for Coindesk’s 10 Most Influential People in Crypto year-end feature, and the idea of creating art that celebrated all the interesting folks in the scene just felt right. I’ve done about 20 portraits since then, and am always on the lookout for new people to feature. But I also wanted to do something really ambitious this year … which is where this new piece comes in.
Supper at the Bitcoin Moonbase took over a hundred manhours to complete, and I’m honestly still a little surprised it’s finally done. I normally don’t like explaining art (I’m firmly in the camp that art should be subjective to each viewer), but there’s enough stuff going on here that a little bit of explanation probably wouldn’t hurt:
The main goal with Supper was to celebrate the Bitcoin core developers who have spent so much time making Bitcoin the most secure cryptocurrency on the planet, as well as to salute some of the awesome art and memes that came before me.
On the left, the developers are Luke Dashjr, Jonas Schnelli, Erik Lombrozo, Cory Fields, Peter Todd, Wladimir Van der Laan.
On the right, they are Suhas Daftuar, Alex Morcos, Matt Corallo, Pieter Wuille, Andrew Poelstra, Greg Maxwell.
Dorian S. Nakamoto stands proudly in the center, because well, we don’t have a Jesus figure in the Bitcoin scene anymore. On the table, I reference some of the companies that these folks work with, and because I like drawing lots of tiny details, I’ve drawn a bunch of other tangential things as well.
I’ll leave it to the viewer to identify all of the other little inside jokes and easter eggs scattered around, but I should mention that I also pay homage to the work of awesome artists like Jamie Redman, Cryptograffiti, Coin_Artist, and SatoshiGallery, amongst many others.