THE STORY BEHIND

PONS is a collection of 9 themed pawns, each one designed from the same base piece. The project started back in 2021, originally as a personal concept that briefly overlapped with the NFT space. It never launched in that context, and honestly, I'm glad it didn't. I eventually stepped away from that world entirely, and PONS got shelved along with it.

It sat unfinished for a few years. About a few months ago I picked it back up, finished the remaining pieces, and decided to put it out as what it always should have been: a pure CGI art project.

What you're seeing is the complete collection of 9. Some pieces date back to 2021, others were finished throughout early 2026. You might notice a difference in quality and approach between them, but in a way, the gap is part of the story.

Closing a chapter. Though who knows, maybe Volume 2 happens someday.

THE INSPIRATION

Dozens of concepts were explored, sketched out, and started before these made the cut. Some didn't survive the early stages. Others got far enough to hurt to abandon. That's the part that doesn't make it into the final scroll.

Inspiration came from everywhere: aesthetics, color palettes I was drawn to, music, pop culture, random references that stuck. There was no rigid system or overarching concept tying everything together, just a feeling of yes, this deserves a world.

Some pieces did draw from a specific idea I had early on: the things a kid gets obsessed with growing up. That universal rotation of phases every kid goes through. The astronaut phase. The pirate phase. The ninja, the cowboy, the explorer. Each one a whole world for a while, then replaced by the next. That idea didn't end up defining the collection, but it shaped a few of the pieces and it's still a territory with a lot left to explore.

COMING BACK

There is something strange about opening a file you haven't touched in years. The work is exactly as you left it, but you are not the same person who made it. Skills have changed. Taste has shifted. What felt ambitious in 2021 might read as unfinished now, or it might surprise you and hold up better than you expected. Sometimes both happen in the same file.

Coming back to PONS after years away meant doing that with several pieces at once. Some of them I looked at and immediately remembered why I was excited. Others took a minute to reconnect with. A few humbled me a little.

The next piece was the first one I built from scratch after the hiatus. I wasn't sure what to expect from myself after that much time away, but the process was smooth in a way I didn't anticipate, and the result genuinely surprised me. It was the kind of moment that confirms something: that the time away wasn't lost, it was accumulating. That piece got me excited to finish the rest.

BLANK

This is the base: a blank pawn, a blank platform, no color, no theme, no direction yet. It was the same starting point every single time, and that constraint was intentional. The challenge was never "what do I make" in the open-ended sense. It was always "where does this specific pawn go from here."

Working from a fixed template does something interesting creatively. It removes a certain kind of paralysis because the form is already decided, and it forces the concept to do all the heavy lifting. The shape stays the same. Everything else, the world around it, the textures, the lighting, the mood, the story, that is where each piece lives or dies.

BEHIND THE SCENES

What you just scrolled through took years to get here, in one way or another.

Every piece in this collection was 3D modeled, textured, rendered, and composited from scratch: Blender for the 3D work, Figma for layout and composition, Lightroom for color, DaVinci Resolve for the final touches. A handful of assets like foliage or PBR materials were pulled from external libraries, but the work is otherwise entirely handmade.

No AI was used in the creation of any piece.