Pijee has gone missing. We were following the river Eastbound when we were accosted by a band of brigands. I don’t remember much of what happened, and what I do remember doesn’t make any sense. I can only attribute my twisted memories to my state of delirium, possibly brought about by Pijee’s herbal potions. It seemed to me that one of the attackers turned into a great serpent with horns that were as red as blood and flew up above the lake. Incredibly, Pijee herself turned into a ferocious giant bird, and the two fought across the sky. What happened next is a muddle of sensory impressions. Thunder and bright flashes of lightning as the two battled in the heavens against a mosaic of images like those etched in their wooden totems.
From Drake and the Great Horned Serpent by 
I recently self-published a book of supernatural short stories on Kindle Books. I decided to make an animation for one of the stories and tokenize it for submission to the NFT Showroom art contest, which has a deadline of October 21, 2021. At the time when the contest was announced, the book was still unpublished, so I had to race to finish it before the art contest deadline because I wanted to publish the book and the animation at the same time.
I focused on a story called Drake and the Great Horned Serpent, which is the sequel to one of the stories I had previously published on Hive some time ago: Pizarro and the Golden Were-Jaguar
In particular, I decided to create an animation based on the above quoted paragraph. I began with a simple sketch.
It quickly evolved into a rather ambitious project
Then it came back down to earth. As soon as I began the digital paint, I knew that the animation was going to take off in unexpected directions. The animation that I had in mind didn't come to fruition, except to inspire the general theme of the piece. Even though the plan didn't come out as mapped, I feel all the better for having traveled these uncharted territories.
Unlike 3D animation or vector-based animations like Flash, those made in software like Krita require drawing each keyframe to create a smooth motion. As you can imagine, this is labor intensive and time cosumming. The more complex your piece the more work is necessary. You can find many tips and tricks online but at the end of the day, you just gotta hustle. My deadline was October 21 (today), and I published the book and tokenized the animation in the past two days. Phew! Cutting it close. It feels so good meeting deadliness.
If you're interested in the tokenized version, please visit my NFT Showroom gallery. Also check out #nftsr10k for some of the submitted artwork to the contest, which is a celebration of NFT Showroom's explosive growth in the NFT market.
