In the latest edition of our interview series we talk to the man behind the unique NFT project, Wood Lords.
Differing from a lot of CNFT drops these NFTs start life as physical bits of wood, cut and shaped to form faces and accessories before being transferred to the digital world to be finished off.
Tell us a little about the project, what type of artwork is it, what size drop?
Season one mint will be 1000 (One thousand) unique tokens.
The project began as an idea of combining a couple of things that I love. First is woodworking and the second is new tech!
Each Wood Lord starts with a hand carved block of wood locally sourced and a few accessories. I try to experiment with different combinations of accessories and colours until I find the right set that I know I’d love to have in my wallet!
The process of producing each NFT is a very manual process and it starts with wood carving, wood sanding and finding the right accessories for each character. After that I set up the correct lighting and take a photo. Once I have a few raw images, I move to the iPad and start processing these images and bring them to life as new characters.
What makes this project unique?
Wood Lords are unique because they are real-life art pieces that can be bought in our auction and displayed on a mantel or desk to go with the NFT in your digital wallet.
The uniqueness of Wood Lords comes from the fact that these are handmade objects, and some of the wood pieces used in this project are shaped by the random forces of nature like oceans and streams.
I have a collection of wood pieces that I acquired while going on hikes or trips to the beach. I utilize the organic & natural look of the unfinished wood into new ideas such as hair, moustache or ear-rings.
One of these days while I was working on Wood Lord “Morpheus” I was putting together these reflective glass beads as eyes to give the wood block the look of wearing sunglasses – similar to the sunglasses used by Morpheus in the Matrix movie.
Once I moved the image to my iPad to process it, I realized that I had taken a self portrait, as my own reflection was on these beads. If you zoom into the eyes you can literally enter into my workshop and see my hands and other objects that I used on different characters!
Here’s the image on our twitter account.
Do you think we are reaching a saturation point for the more generic PFP projects leading to a growing interest in the projects with a little more time and craftsmanship?
Absolutely, I mean if you look at the current state of the CNFT world you will find few projects with top level craftsmanship and many copies of the same thing!
Frankly I don’t think these generic projects will ever stop, as long as there’s a minting service that will accept these projects they will keep coming. I hope at some point one of these minting services would consider evaluating CNFT projects before publishing.
Just like any reputable book publishers. A top publishing house won’t publish any book! They study the script and weed through books before publishing. We do need more of that!
What about the team behind the project? Tell us a bit about the team and what has lead you to this project.
For the most part this project was a one man show. From conception until a few weeks ago I was running the show alone.
I had the idea and just ran with it! My experience in woodworking helped a lot. I’ve built a few wood art pieces before but they were mostly to hang around my home office or give out to friends and family.
After browsing around the CNFT community I did notice that nobody is using organic materials. So I wanted to try it out.
My first iterations of WoodLords were kinda ugly, mainly because I didn’t know how to use Procreate. I had to teach myself how to use Procreate in a week!
With time and the help of the community critics I realized what needs improvement and focused on that from a digital processing perspective and what accessories to use on the wood blocks. I also built the website, created the discord server and run the twitter account.
A few weeks ago some community members reached out and wanted to get involved. Nighthawke is now my right-hand woman, she helps out in project management and community engagement. Find her @callnighthawke
What got the team interested in Blockchain and NFT’s?
A friend had mentioned Bitcoin a while back, however I just recently got more involved in the technology and started a Cardano node to understand how inputs & outputs are created.
I read more about the technology of blockchains and the use cases. I think IOHK is doing a great job with decentralization and community building with a big vision to give the unbanks a more stable financial life.
NFTs on Cardano are great because they are native and with smart contracts enabled last month we are on the right track. Still patiently waiting for Hydra!
Is there a roadmap for the future of the project?
Yes, we are planning the following:
Season One
Everyone will be able to get their hands on a Wood Lord! This will be a General Availability mint.
There will be a total of 1000 NFTs
Each NFT will be unique (1 of 1)
10 Characters will be announced
Drop Dates will be in winter of 2021
Auction
An Auction will be held for a chance to own a physical Wood Lord. The main pieces used in our Wood Lords will be put together as a set with all the different eyes, hats, features and shipped to the highest bidder. This will give the lucky person an opportunity to own a physical Lord and be able to switch its features to match their NFTs.
Season Two
More awesome things to come, we are in the testing phases of different materials and characters to fit in the Wood Castle universe.
What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far with this project?
It is so fun to deal with all the challenges with this project. I like a good challenge, that’s how I stay in the zone and focus more on the task.
The main challenge with Wood Lords is ensuring the quality of the images are up to standard. I hate to see imperfections in the images, because of that I take my time in creating and processing these images. Not enough time is my biggest challenge.
Of all the platforms you could have chosen to launch on, why Cardano?
Main reason for choosing Cardano was the team behind Cardano and the amount of research that was put into building the blockchain.
Second, the community is a very close-knit group especially in the NFT space. In addition to the fact that Tokens are native assets and transaction fees are low.
IOHK is doing a great job at building the community. I recently got involved in voting for cool projects to be funded in the Catalyst Project which is super cool as it unlocks the creativity of the community. Anyone can submit a proposal and we all vote on it. Keeping the decentralization idea alive.
What project would you ideally love to do a collaboration with?
I’ve done a few fan arts and would love to collaborate with some of these projects like DeadPxlz & Yummi Universe. I also find Clay Nation to be a wonderful project to collaborate with.
Do you guys collect NFT’s too? What’s your favourite? Can we see it?
Oh yeah, I have a great collection of tokens, I love to see beautiful art in my wallet and gotta say my favourite was what Oodon did with the Fahad 10K tribute release and the airdrop of CNFT characters that followed was pure genius!
I also own Clays, DeadPxlz and of course Deep Vision. The most recent one was the Buffybot Legacy Pass and i’m waiting for these airdrops! It’s gonna be great!
Thanks to Wood Lord (Hyder) for discussing the project with us and giving us a little more insight into what is takes to produce these NFTs.
Please let us know what you thoughts or ask any questions in the comments below and don’t forget to check out the rest of our interviews.
If this interview piqued your interest follow Wood Lords on Twitter and check out their website.