From NFTs to Editions: The Unexpected Beginning of Ash Badios Art
A few years ago, I went looking into NFTs.
Not because I had a grand plan to build a limited edition art business. Quite the opposite. I was simply curious about the crypto world and what artists were doing with digital releases.
Very quickly, I realised that the nature of NFT collections often called for multiple versions of related images. That idea caught my attention. Not so much the idea of creating a traditional series, but iterations. One image becoming another, then another. Similar visual DNA, but each work taking on its own personality.
And down the rabbit hole I went.
Opening the archive.
I started by digging through years of paintings, drawings, sketches and even doodles I had stored away.
I’ve always kept fragments of work that weren’t necessarily finished pieces in themselves, but felt as though they might have another life one day.
Apparently, that creative rainy day had arrived.
Some drawings were added to. Others were repainted or reworked. Then I began scanning and photographing them so I could start developing different versions digitally.
That led straight into another rabbit hole.
I became fascinated with the tiny details I was capturing. Enlarged textures of paper, canvas and other substrates. Marks left by paint and drawing materials. Lines and imperfections that might barely register in the original work suddenly became landscapes of their own when viewed at extreme scale.
With more than 25 years working in design, digital tools were already a very natural part of the way I think. So I began layering, cropping, enlarging and knitting these fragments together in Photoshop.
I used software such as Topaz Gigapixel to take tiny sections and increase them to workable sizes. I experimented with scripts and code, helped along considerably by having a software-writing husband nearby, and kept manipulating the images further.
By this point, NFTs had become a distant object in the rear-view mirror.
Ironically, I never ended up minting a single NFT. By then, the experiment had already taken me somewhere much more interesting.
Still my language, but something new...
Eventually I had a catalogue of around 300 works across different colour ways and variations.
Despite all the digital manipulation, I could still see the visual language of my original work running through them. The line work, symbols, shapes and colour palettes all threaded back to the paintings and drawings they had come from.
I’m under no illusion that someone walking down the street would actaully recognise an “Ash Badios”. My work hasn’t been shown on that kind of scale. But the visual language in these pieces still comes directly from years of my own painting, drawing and design practice.
I knew where the work had come from.
It had visual provenance.
That mattered to me. These weren’t images generated from nowhere. There was a history underneath them, sometimes literally several histories layered on top of one another.
The finished works sit somewhere between painting, design and digital process, which is very much where my contemporary abstract art practice has evolved.
Then I printed one at scale.
This was the point where everything changed.
I’m lucky enough to have a professional large-format printer in my studio, so I started printing some of the works at A0.
Suddenly they had presence.
Details that had been interesting on screen became much more apparent at scale. Textures opened up. Lines started pulling the eye around the work. The images began affecting the wall and the space around them.
And the colour changed too.
There is something I love about what archival pigment ink does when it hits paper. Greens become almost alien. Magentas somehow feel more passionate. Colours become more saturated and alive than they ever felt sitting on a monitor.
Even when I printed early tests on ordinary bond paper, the works still had depth and presence.
I remember the buzz of watching those first large prints peel off the print bed.
That was when I knew.
If they worked at A0, they could work larger.
From experiment to edition
I began testing different sizes and eventually settled on a range from 50 × 50 cm through to 140 × 140 cm.
I wanted the smaller sizes to work in more intimate spaces, while the larger pieces could function as large abstract wall art and properly influence a room.
And that was really the beginning of the Editions, a collection of limited edition abstract prints developed from my original paintings, drawings and digital iterations.
I chose to make them limited rather than endlessly reproducible because I like the sense of preciousness that comes with a finite edition.
I was never interested in licensing the images endlessly or producing them forever.
There is something appealing about allowing a work to exist for a certain period and in a certain number, and then moving on to develop something new.
The first proof still gets me
Even now, one of my favourite parts of the process is watching the first artist proof come off the printer.
I usually begin small, either A4 or around 300 × 300 mm, using good quality paper on my studio printer. It lets me check the vibrancy, saturation and balance before testing the work at a larger scale.
From there, I produce larger tests and eventually trial the image on the archival paper and canvas used for the final editions.
But that very first print is still the moment.
I sense almost immediately whether the work is doing what I hoped it would do.
Sometimes it needs more saturation. Sometimes a crop changes everything. Sometimes something that looked fantastic on screen simply doesn’t hold together in print.
And sometimes it rolls off the printer and my heart skips a little.
That feeling is probably the best explanation for why these works became Ash Badios Art.
They started as an experiment in iteration.
Somewhere along the way, they became something I wanted to put on walls.