“WITCHES wander the weird wilds of the world, unafraid and unfettered. They drip from moonlight and the edges of stars, sculpt each other from beeswax and jackal fangs.”

These words welcome you to the homepage of Cryptocoven, a collection of  9768 digital-art portraits sold as NFTs. 

One witch,  Sirius, The Sufficient Hyperplane,  has medium, warm-toned skin, a chiseled jawline, red eyes, and long, straight, silver hair. “You make your own jewelry from trinkets and dried hearts,” reads the character’s description. “Your magic spawns from paint splatters. You see the truth reflected.” Sirius is a mage, a Sagittarius sun, Scorpio moon, and Aquarius rising. 

The project is the brainchild of five creatives who go by the pseudonyms Aletheia, Aradia, Keridwen, Nyx, and Xuannu. They each work on different components of the projects, which encompasses art, lore, storytelling, the tech component, and community building.

What sets the Cryptocoven art apart from other projects of a similar scope is the cultural and visual milieu it chose to inhabit. Both the art and the concept behind each avatar draws from influences that defined the 1990s zeitgeist, such as the art of Naoko Takeuchi (Sailor Moon) and CLAMP (Magic Knight Rayearth, Clover, Card Captor Sakura); character parameters are laid out in a way that is familiar to all of those who ever played with Pokemon cards or games such as Final Fantasy, which relies on a “job” and “class” system to define the playable characters. 

Visually, haute-couture references to the likes of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen abound. One witch, for example, has the same iconic pompadour-like, side-swept bangs as the character of Miranda Priestley as portrayed by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada; others sport the Hime cut, the cheek-length sidelocks and blunt bangs rooted in Japanese royalty which Cher famously wore early in her career.

“We just started pulling together mood boards and sources and then from there we identified traits or elements of these witches that we really resonated with,” says Aletheia, who, alongside Nyx, is in charge of the art and visual development. Nyx, she says, loves taupes and soft pastels, and has a dynamic style, while she  favors neon and saturated hues and has a more structured style. 

Choosing to limit the artwork to a portraiture deliberately puts the eyes and the face to the forefront.  “I think it was like Nyx who decided she really wanted to bring forth the female gaze, in terms of how we, you know, depicted women,” Aletheia says. “Like a more empowered way that wasn't just like, boobs and lips and like, you know, the very hooded eyes. The female gaze is also reflected in how each witch is looking back at you. You're communing with the image rather than looking at it as an object, and [the artwork] is also looking back at you…there's like, a sense of recognition or reflection that happens when the artwork you're looking at is responding in that way.” 

Shaping the Characters

The creators actively sought to honor different body types and shapes, inspired, in Aletheia’s words, by the Fenty collections and campaigns. “I developed those three ways to reference a range of face shapes and try to figure out  what commonalities they had in between l different groups of faces and how we can portray them in a way that was more agnostic to some of the cultural associations,” she explains. “We have lithe, soft, and chiseled and we were trying to like to stay away from gender references, trying to express the core quality of those shapes.” 

The portraiture plays a large role in world-building and storytelling, says Xuannu, the creator responsible for the culturecraft component of the project. “Our minds are just wired to recognize and personify faces,” Xuannu says., “These witches are characters with whom people can identify, as beings with agency who can be heroes or villains or otherwise cause change in this fictional world.” 

In technical terms, materially speaking, the witches themselves are made out of approximately 23 layers. Nyx and Aletheia created a total of 1000 individual assets that combine for  millions of possible iterations. Aletheia offers a thorough explainer on Twitter that showcases how hand-drawn assets were used to generate the combinations.  

From Portraiture to World Building

The project has since expanded into a more concrete world-building effort, which is now known as The Narrator’s Hut, a series of short stories that delve into the backgrounds of the witches, where they're from, and what their goals and motivations are. A series of short stories goes hand in hand with a point-and-click-style interface where you can interact with the items that are associated with the stories. “Then depending on what witch you have, [an item] takes the form or the attributes of the which are meeting it with,” explains Aletheia. “The character that you have, essentially influences the story that you experience, the experience.” 

There won’t be any more witches, but that does not mean the universe is closed. The community created cognate NFT projects witch hearts and coven cats, but the expansions go beyond the blockchain technology: there are playable witch avatars in legend maps, a pathfinder kit and a fictional detective agency, among others. “This was our intention—we would [just] create the foundational narrative base,” said Aletheia. 

The project also permeated real life, with people cosplaying their witches in terms of hair and makeup. “I have never had people cosplay my art before and just to see like, oh, from like a digital representation into like, physical real world is….” Aletheia trails off. “I make the art but like, it's really the people who love it that like to bring it to life.”

True to the words of the homepage, “While no one may own a WITCH [as there won’t be any more witches beyond the original 9768 ones anyone can become one.”