<center>![bird2.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaCMhv2A8oMnTRxBDHE1Qtgz9MaZ4NrP4eR4PY2Fgj7MQ/bird2.jpg)</center>
{{art by me}}

## The last month has left little time for me to casually blog, but it’s now time for the big update. I’ve been meaning to write this for a while!

You may or may not have known about the artist collective, Slothicorn that I founded last year. I created as a loose collective of artists, and I feel that it made some valuable contributions, but I never started it as a business, as it lacked the structure for that. But that experience of building an artist community showed me what is possible. 

Last year, I realized Steem would not be the right home for my artist collective, and I set my sights on EOS, mainly due to leadership and philosophical reasons. I resonate more with Dan Larimer, so it was obvious where I was headed. That is not to say I won’t be blogging on Steem or using it, it is just that I wanted a smart contract platform, with NFTs (non-fungible tokens) for artists and EOS has more features to build upon. Steem is still important for many people who want to post without a centralized entity causing issues. That is, I think its core value (at least it is for me). Medium restricts accounts, and so do many other platforms. Steem still is easy to publish on, and can be accessed by everyone, including the Chinese.That’s kind of a big deal actually. 

Maybe Steem can rise up to its potential, and new community leadership finds it way, but for me, I want to be where leadership already exists, today, now and that is EOS. There doesn’t seem to be as much mud slinging in EOS, sure there is some, but it’s not happening at the top of the food chain, i.e., not inside Block One. Unlike a lot of people. I actually think it’s better to have a well-funded company leading the direction of a crypto project. A lot of crypto projects are just like feral cats wandering around, without direction. EOS is very interesting in that respect because it has a well-organized and well-funded company leading the development of the open source software, and it also sets a tone for the entire culture in EOS. It’s something that creates an organized culture. Is it perfect? No. No human endeavor or society is perfect. We are flawed beings. 

Also, leading a group is so much more difficult than creating one, and through my experience founding Slothicorn, I could see that I lacked some very important personality characteristics that are critical to any project. We were also lacking programmers, and a business-minded leader, and all of these things combined made me realize that I wanted to be part of a team, and have some sort of role, but not as the person leading the entire project. Did I make mistakes? Of course I did. Now, I realize much better what I am capable of, and what I am not good at. I have trouble finishing things, and so, I am good at creating vast amounts of “starter energy” that startups require. I do this very well. I can get people quickly interested in new things, and can teach people through infographics, art and writing about new projects. This is my main skill.

It was quite recent, after I quit working for ONO that I began to look for an art project on EOS, and by accident, I found myself in the pixEOS telegram group. At that time there were 4 people in it, and somehow, myself, Fabi and Yu found ourselves in there. The pixEOS team started having art contests, and it was incredibly fun, the energy didn’t seem to resemble the bear market at all. Yusaymon won that first art contest, which amounted to 20 EOS, I think.
I got hooked fast. 

But after some negative experiences at ONO, I was suspicious. I didn’’t want to spend my energy and time in a project that I had not fully investigated. So I began to ask the co-founder of pixEOS questions, lots of questions. This went on for at least a week, maybe more. 

Everything about the pixEOS project is something that I dreamed of last year. It promises to merge art, creativity, community and tokenomics in a seamless way, with creators as the main contributors of the platform. I’ve been wanting to play a vital role in helping creators find ways to monetize their creativity, and pixEOS feels like my best shot at that. I am really going into this head-on.

I’ve been working as part of the pixEOS team for over a month now, and we are about to release our first game called PIXEOS PAINT. This paint game is like gamified digital graffiti. We will have a close beta version for testing and then the game will launch around the end of January. It’s been a big buildup to this moment and the team has already built some cool things, too.

One of the things the team built is called the [Avatar Maker](https://avatar.pixeos.art) This came about because the pixEOS artists could no longer meet the demand from people in the community who wanted custom pixel avatars made. So, even though the Avatar Maker was not in the pixEOS roadmap, it was built, programmed and designed specifically to meet community demand. You can make your own free, custom pixel avatar in less than a minute here: https://avatar.pixeos.art

Here’s a short video I made to explain how to use the Avatar Maker: 
https://youtu.be/UHs3Y8uYbys

It’s really fun and it has been spreading like a virus in the EOS ecosystem. 

When I first made some avatar with this tool, I thought not too many variations existed, but through experimenting I made a wide variety of different images, art and some really cool things that I was not expecting. 

Here’s an animated pixeos avatar that I made using the Avatar Maker and giphy.com:

<center>https://media.giphy.com/media/fBMylVupUyWKdVdTcq/giphy.gif</center>


And here’s a video I made with lots of the avatars I made from the pixEOS Avatar Maker:

https://youtu.be/d1D9fPVP8bs

Anyway, I have been busy, so busy. Pixeos is really capturing my attention and energy these days and I wonder if it will become the EOS magic factory that I dreamed of last year……

Read about pixEOS in Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/geraldfenech/2019/01/15/integrating-art-gaming-and-commerce-through-blockchain/#1a71b28156d3