About: Nature Is Healing. Backstory.

Early summer of 2022 I've been really fascinated with AI art, some of which is on Layer 2 of Ethereum. I got my hands on VQGAN in early July and started playing with it. I had been drawn to nature type of AI art from the beginning, mostly because of how spacious and powerful nature is and how it can be translated to Art. I thought it would be cool to create a big collection, maybe a couple of thousand pieces, that's free and just let mint whoever wants to mint. One of the crucial nuances that I got from AI art is that when it comes to creating and getting outputs, everything seems to be quite new and fascinating for the brain. However, I didn't want to just randomly produce many outputs no matter how astonishing they can be because to me they still lacked one crucial piece and felt empty. As I've gotten a bit better with more practice, I figured out that I'm going to create a collection of 324 pieces. 324 being a reference to EZPZ and ethfinance. It was working out quite well and after a few thousand pieces I settled on 12 artists, 3 fundamentals and 9 words that were enriching the core foundation, thus totaling 324 pieces. I bought a pro version of the google collab to speed my process up a little bit and got to work. It took me about a month to create all those days as I was creating them non-stop. Yes I just had to wait for AI to do the 'work' but I still was very involved. I had been using high iterations of a couple of thousands plus for each piece so it would take me 1 hour at best or more like 80-90 minutes on average to create a couple for a potential piece. As you can imagine, some particular combinations weren't not working perfectly. I took a couple of weeks to recharge and came back to revise about 60% of the collection. Let's go on a tangent because it is important to point out that I chose to be more perfect when it comes to my collection. Perfection in lots of things was a big part of me in the past but then after loads of inner work it had changed and at some point it wasn't that much of me. We thought it would be a perfect moment to have more perfection and have a collaborative and creative approach. Like all the parts, perfection is neither good nor bad. Collaborative approach within myself helped to have the best out of all the words. Being purely perfectionistic would not have worked as this collection would not have ever been released, it has taken a long time to come to the finality and yet there's still so many details to improve on according to my perfection and that's okay and that's the beauty of this collection. I've put probably around 200-400 hours into this. Going back to my revising the collection, after that big revision I still wasn't satisfied and made many additional revisions and changes, thus keeping my process evolving as I kept reworking 30-40% of the collection which would take lots of time again. I want to give my friend - doomfuzz - a huge shoutout, he helped me out a lot with his perspective and judgments. It helped my judgmental and perfectionistic parts to keep evolving and look for small details in lightning, contrast, colors, types of texture and focus among other things. I kept going on and on and on with my revisions. And again, since it wasn't the fastest process it would take me hours to wait for revisioned versions only for those needing to be changed again. In the meantime there were other sets of topics that I needed to think through such as royalties & pricing, final quantity of pieces, distribution, quality of NFTs themselves (resolutions etc), how everything is being tied together (longevity of the collection and thus where to release). On top of all of that, I needed for my collection and each NFT by itself to have what I feel is the lacking in AI Art NFTs by default - fullness. There needs to be some energy to make it complete. A sum of space, oneness, intention, creativity, meaning, purpose, fulness, abundance and love. Since my vision still involved nature, it was really important to solidify what it exactly means. Coincidentally, I have had many awful experiences as I have been working on my collection on top of my existing struggles. And it was really important for me not to capture any of that pain or burdens, I chose to focus on something that's greater than all of that and can hold and heal anything and I could not ask for a better representation of it - Nature is all of that space and healing. 
I'll finish up with a quick review of some points that I needed to consider and my thoughts in terms of the decisions.  
Final collection size ended up being only 45. The best 45 pieces out of thousands. The best art that I've created and, most importantly, the one that contains the most powerful energy.  
Royalties & Pricing: Free, 0%. My intention was for people to appreciate art and nature for what it is. I've chosen not to go with 100% royalty to discourage trading because while I - 696 - is the one who have created the collection, I am not the one who has power of what to do with pieces after they are going to be distributed.  
Distribution Method: Whitelist only because I don't want it to be botted and because of the small number. Completely subjective. For the first round, 15 wallets are going to be whitelisted, a few people haven't gotten back to me. There's still 30 left. No rush to give them out. 
Tools used: VQGAN AI through google collab. ESRGAN and Upscale.media for upscaling. 
The amount of intention and details that I've put into this is in all the hundreds of hours. I took countless brakes. I made countless decisions. Decisions of choosing to choose or not to choose something.  
We've even chosen to write this backstory in a more free flowy form with some basic editing to provide clarity while also providing the richness, vastness and authenticity of 696.  
My final reminder to you my dear human being is in the name of the collection and, of course, in the art itself: Nature Is Healing. Always remember how spacious and powerful Nature is and how it can hold and heal anything. It's always there. As you go through this journey that we call life and happen to find yourself in the bottoms of bottoms or even in some dip, I hope this art serves as a reminder and a healing piece. It does have a sprinkle of my - 696's - vast unlimited unconditional pure playful compassionate love too <3