Water Magic | Crypto Coven | Product Design | Uphill Battles | Constitution DAO | Meta | False Balance | Broken UX | Facts | Visual Cues | Stretching Canvas | Sad Girls Bar | Alexander McQueen | Gesso | Art Theft | Attribution + Intention | Tea
I first met Williamsburg-based artist jacknetic in the Crypto Coven Discord, where we teamed up on a case for the Weird Wilds Detective Agency (a tongue-in-cheek PFP PI group maintained by Coven mainstay oldking). But after following Jacklyn on Twitter I learned that the person behind the witch avatar is not just an unparalleled sleuth, but a visual artist of the highest order.
She began minting her “Water Magic” series of watercolour figures in early 2022. They are exquisitely wrought, with a delicate, ethereal quality grounded by the tactile nature of the medium (and her secret ingredient — tea!). Pensive and playful, with an escapist sense of drift, each 1/1 painting was snapped up at a caffeinated pace in active auctions, and last week her collection topped the charts like the hit singles they are and began trending on the front page of OpenSea.
When we spoke over Zoom a few days ago, I learned that web3’s #1 artist / detective has at least one more impressive threat in her quiver: by day she’s a Design Director for one of the biggest tech companies in the world. We talked about her experiences at Meta, how a solo holiday can stimulate new artistic approaches, and the woeful state of design in web3.
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Jacklyn?
Hi! Sorry, I was looking at a bunch of code.
Oh, no worries.
Even though I’m not a developer, I’m a product designer. But I was looking at some code for some reason.
I’ve been trying to learn to code. It is not easy.
And what do you do?
Oh, like, full time?
Yeah. Or just in general?
I’m a screenwriter and director, and I work in ads a lot.
Oh yeah?
Yeah, Fofo is my, I don’t know, web3 secret identity? But I’ve been learning to code because I fell in love with generative art a year ago. I took that NYU Creative Coding Course, I’ve worked through Matt Pearson’s book on Processing, and I spend all my free time playing around in p5js.
Did it kind of spark your brain?
Yes! I haven’t done a lot of math since high school, and it’s not like code is pure math or anything… I feel like I’m already doing a terrible job of communicating math’s role in coding. Probably because I still don’t really know much about it. How familiar are you with coding?
I wasn’t at all, but I work with a lot of engineers, so it’s around.
I know you as a 1/1 artist, but what kind of product design do you do?
I’m a Product Design Director, newly minted, at Meta.
Oh congrats! That’s crazy! Is that brand new, being at Meta?
I’ve been working at then-Facebook for six years. I work with a lot of engineers, and we do a lot of accelerated prototyping, so you kind of have to know a little bit about code or you have to know a little bit about how code works to make prototypes.
I love that you’re a super talented artist succeeding in web3 and you’re also killing it at a major company. How is it there for you?
I really love working at Meta. I started working here right before the election, like literally, January 2016. I’ve been able to work on things that I really care about and push the company to do good things.
It sounds nearly as utopic as Crypto Coven. Where we met! How did you find Crypto Coven?
A really, really good friend of mine started going down the web3 rabbit hole in 2020. She took a month off to explore web3.
So this was on the clock, or was it like a personal sabbatical month?
No, they knew. Meta is pretty flexible in just giving people a month off — it’s called your recharge — where you can do whatever you want. You can travel the world, you can take an internship. And she really wanted to go deep in web3, and she became a huge part of this Constitution DAO thing.
Yes! I remember Constitution DAO. They got so close!
Yeah! She was a huge part of Constitution DAO. She was sending me all of these articles and I was like, “I have no idea what this is.” And one day I logged into Twitter and I saw she changed her profile photo. And I knew nothing about NFTs and nothing about eth and nothing about any of it. But I saw her profile photo and I was like, “What is this? I need this in my life.” And she ended up minting three Crypto Covens and she just sent me one.
Oh nice!
Yeah, she sent me one of them. And you know, this was right before the holiday, right, in December? And I just became super obsessed with the artwork, the lore, the thoughtfulness. I joined the Discord community, and this was my first time ever using Discord. Everyone was just so nice. How did you find out about Crypto Coven?
Oh, do you know Sad Girls Bar?
Yeah, I have a Sad Girl.
We’re in all the same projects! So I was into Sad Girls, and they had this derivatives contest in like September or October 2021, and Sad Girls retweeted an entry that one of the High Witches did, a Sad Girls derivative in Coven style. And I was just like, “Oh, that’s cool, I like this art.” And I checked out the Coven Twitter and just really liked it.
This was before the mint?
Yeah, I guess this was like mid-October? Early October-ish? They only had a few hundred followers at that point. I just fell in love with the lore. It was the first project I’d seen that had truly beautiful writing, not just cool art.
And you’re a writer, that makes total sense, you were pulled in. So you came in through Sad Girls and then you saw all of the world building and then you went into the Discord?
Eventually. I was still so new to it all, and I didn’t really spend time in the Discord until January. December was such a blur, everyone in our house got sick, there were lockdowns in Toronto again. But yes! And it’s one of the only Discords I actually want to spend time in. What is about the Coven Discord that keeps you so active with it?
There’s something that is so special with Crypto Coven, there’s something with the lore and the world building and how active the High Witches are, you really do get lost in it.
And I’m not somebody that broadcasts, ever. Like if you know me in real life, I’m very much a real life person. I like talking to people in real life, I like hearing people’s voices. I don’t post online, I rarely post on Instagram. My friends are always like, “Proof of life? Are you alive?”
Crypto Coven’s Discord is the first time I’ve been in an online community with people that are literal strangers, that I just typed something, like, “What’s up? Hey.” Now it just feels so natural.
I’m curious about your take on the UX of Discord, from a product designer’s perspective. As a user, I found Discord really difficult to navigate at first. Still, really. I don’t find it super user-friendly.
I mean, there are so many things in web3 that as a product designer, you’re just like, “Uhh, this really hurts my soul.”
Please fix it. How will you fix web3 UX?
I think there’s something that is a unique skill of a product designer. A lot of engineers — a lot of people — they just think about what the end goal is, okay? “We need people to connect their wallet so they can buy NFTs,” or “We need people to join the Discord and verify their NFT so they can have access to X amount of channels,” etc, etc, etc.
Product designers think about not just the end goal, but the entire experience. How do we want people to feel? Where do we want to add friction? Where do we not want to add friction? How do we make it? How do we make it clear how you get to your end goal, what are the visual cues that need to happen?
And a lot of that stuff is missing in web3. So in Discord, for example, when you are in a different channel, you can see the pop-ups from other servers, and then you accidentally tap on them. Or maybe you want to be immersed in that channel. You know, you don’t want to see messages from Sad Girls Bar when you’re in Crypto Coven, or vice versa.
Those are just small UX things, but there’s so many of them. The design of web3 is so broken, it’s crazy.
I don’t want to assign you all of it, but I do feel like you and only you can fix it.
Haha. Do you feel this way as somebody that’s not a designer?
Yeah, I mean, as you’re talking about the whole experience, I wonder if that’s one of the main appealing things about Crypto Coven, their whole world, the site, the way it’s built, the way the Discord is structured.
You know, as we think about community organization and how you organize an online community, Discord is one of the few platforms that actually has even the ability to organize. The Crypto Coven Discord itself is just so well-designed, it’s so well-organized. There are a lot of channels, but I always know exactly where to go. I know to go to, you know, 221B Weird Wilds for detective work, I know to go to Witchspo to talk about the Alexander McQueen show, I know to share my art in Coven Creations. That’s where all the artists hang out.
The whole point of us talking today was to talk about your art, and I feel like so far we’ve talked about everything else but.
That is a strategy. I do not like to talk about myself. So that is definitely a stalling tactic.
I’m pushing through the stall! First of all, congratulations. Your work is so beautiful, and it’s being appreciated in an amazing way in the space.
I did not expect that reaction.
Come on! You have to know. When you look at your work, you know that it’s objectively good.
You have to understand that for a lot of people on the outside, NFT art equals generative art. Or it’s like FoxFam, it’s Cool Cats. And all of those projects are dope as hell, Doodles, Bored Ape Yacht Club. I love the Doodles artwork, and I love the Cool Cats artwork.
They’re so fun.
Yeah. But it’s a very different style. It’s a very, very different style. And that’s the kind of style that’s appreciated by, I would say, the majority of people in the web3 world.
So looking at 1/1 art or looking at artists that are creating at a much smaller scale, even if the art is good, it’s not a given that people are going to appreciate it. Does that make sense?
Absolutely. But your work has cut through the noise.
I think a part of that is finding a niche. And Crypto Coven was a huge part of that story. Because when I first started sharing my art, it was in the Coven Creations channel. It was Christmas, and the Discord was closed, so no new people were coming in. Like, Divine Femininity had not entered the scene. Witches were not expensive at the time, and so it wasn’t a project that had a lot of hype around it. We were just a bunch of people chilling out, you know, sharing stuff. And I was like, “Okay, let me just share this little sketch I’m working on.” And there was this community that was like, “Ooh, we want to see more. What else are you doing?”
So a part of it is finding your niche and finding a group of people that like the art that you’re doing, or support the art that you’re doing, because it’s not like this was a massive 10k PFP project, you know.
Is watercolour your primary medium? Is that what you’ve always worked in?
Not at all. I am a pretty traditional artist. I love mechanical pencil, charcoal line art. I’ve always drawn women or painted women — I think a lot of women paint other women. But I had bought this watercolour paper and had it for a very long time, and I hadn’t done any art in like years.
Wow. You definitely did not get rusty.
Thank you, but life got busy, work was crazy. I was doing all of this election stuff and it was just very all-consuming. So I didn’t have a lot of time for creative expression because I was too busy focusing on work.
But the holidays came, and my husband is French, so he went to France to see his family. His entire family is over there, but it was around the beginning of Omicron, so both of us didn’t go.
And I had this watercolour paper and I had a lot of time, so I was like “Okay, let me just experiment,” and so I painted some women, I put some tea bags on the watercolour paper I had, and I just kind of started. But it’s definitely a new medium for me.
I wanted to ask you about painting with tea. I saw that and was like, “Oh, that’s cool.” Was that also a new vibe?
Yeah, it was new. To be honest, I don’t know why I decided to do it. I really like that background element, like it’s a nice canvas to paint on. I’ve done a lot of oil painting in the past, and generally with oil painting — interesting, this is a subconscious thing I’m just starting to realize now — but with oil painting, generally you stretch your canvas, you build the frame from wood, you staple the canvas paper on the wood to create your rectangle or square, and then you gesso the canvas.
Gessoing is a technique oil painters do, you “gesso” the canvas, which means that you add some background color so you’re not drawing or painting on a white canvas. It adds depth. And gesso is generally yellow, or in the orange-yellow family, and so I guess with the tea, it was like “gesso watercolour”. Like how do I add some kind of depth here? How do I add some kind of texture here, especially since watercolour is a completely new medium for me.
So that tea had the same elements that a gesso layer would have. And I just kind of went with it and I thought it was really cool. And because watercolour is a new medium for me, it meant I actually didn’t have to rely on knowing watercolour techniques. Because so much of the background was already taken up, all I had to do was focus on actually drawing the figures, trying to come up with the emotion that I wanted to go for. And the watercolour ended up being a more additive element to the story I was trying to tell rather than being the core technique.
I love this. I love the experimentation in the work. Trying something new is very web3 to me.
I think it’s something I probably wouldn’t have done if I didn’t have so much time. You know, after the end of the year, I was pretty burnt out at work. And my husband was in France, so I had a lot of time on my own. A lot of our friends were away, too. I’m from Ghana, originally, born and raised, and a lot of our friends are European, or, you know, from different parts of the diaspora. So Trinidad, Brazil. And everybody had gone home. I’m actually going to Ghana in two weeks.
Oh nice!
Yes! But everybody had gone home, and so there was no “Let me meet up with my friend for coffee,” “Let me meet up with some people for drinks.” I had the mental space and time to experiment. Like “Okay, what are we going to do? We’re gonna put some tea on some watercolours.” It wasn’t planned.
And look what happened! You’ve made a number of NFT sales recently with this unplanned work, and you were also trending on the front page of OpenSea. What’s the better feeling? Was it that first sale? Or was it the trending?
Oh, that’s such a good question. Oh, wow. I hadn’t thought about that.
I think my gut would say that the trending on OpenSea meant more than sales. Just because I think the recognition of a platform like OpenSea, the recognition, especially being so new to NFTs. Like I got my Crypto Coven at the end of December, I only learned what an NFT really was over the holiday break, and I minted for the first time only a few weeks before I launched “Water Magic”. So being recognized by a platform like OpenSea is so much more meaningful than any sale I could have made. If that makes sense.
Absolutely it does. And with great success comes a great number of shitty scammers and art thieves. I’ve seen tweets in the past from artists talking about their art getting stolen, but when it started happening to you recently, I was like, “Hey, that’s my internet acquaintance! Don’t do that to Jacknetic!” I was very upset. How are you feeling?
Yeah, it was one of those things where, when it happens to you, you’re so shocked. Like, you have no idea. You feel so helpless. And then you’re like, “Why would someone do this? How do I stop this?”
And you know, we talked about the fact that the design of web3 is so bad from a user perspective — with art theft, you don’t even know how to report, who to report to, you don’t even know all the right steps to take, so you’re feeling so overwhelmed.
And then I think there’s something that people don’t talk about, which is the responsibility you have to people who could potentially buy something of yours that is fake, and not knowing that it’s fake. How do I stop that? How do I prevent people from buying a fake NFT? I feel implicated in this. That’s the thing that causes the most anxiety: how do I prevent people from being scammed?
Has anyone come in and been helpful in any way? Like in a real way, aside from saying they empathize? Has anyone presented any possible solutions?
I mean, I had tweets in my Twitter feed over the course of the last four days with other artists just trying to signal boost: “Hey, this collection is stolen.” “Hey, this is not me.” “Hey, this person stole my artwork, please don’t buy from them.” And it’s not just me this is happening to. So all I’ve seen, there isn’t any real help yet. All I’m seeing is artists just going to Twitter trying to let people know that this is happening, and just try to get the word out as much.
It’s interesting. I feel like the opportunity in web3 for 1/1 artists is incredible, you don’t need to be repped or curated through a gallery, but when you say you feel a sense of responsibility to collectors buying fakes, that’s a role I don’t think artists have really ever had to navigate. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe artists have had to in some form, but it seems unique to this space.
What do you think would be a solution? Being somebody that is, you know, I remember you messaging me, and I don’t think people realize how much that helps, just having other people say, “Hey, we see this happening to you, this is not okay.” And just feeling that support. Because there is a lot of responsibility that comes with putting your art out there. I feel responsibility for anybody that would potentially buy a fake NFT, there is that burden I think a lot of artists have. So, from somebody that’s in this space and watching it, how do you think that can be done?
I wish I had a good answer. I wonder if it’s just a function of how young the space is, something time will fix, in terms of people becoming more sophisticated buyers the longer this goes on.
Like, I remember the first few times I looked at collections I was reading about, just PFP collections, and was like, “Oh, maybe I want to get one of these cute little seals.” And then going to OpenSea and being like, “Hmm, this seems way cheaper than it should be, this shouldn’t be .01 eth,” and then nearly clicking through and buying before listening to the Spidey Sense and investigating further.
But it also feels sort of unfair to just say caveat emptor, though, like it’s entirely on the buyer to be doing due diligence, because on some level you’d expect the marketplace itself to be policing this. There’s nothing you as an artist can do in that moment when someone is mistakenly clicking “buy”. Or even if there’s someone who doesn’t follow you on Twitter, and is buying your stolen art that they’ve stumbled across, buying it purely because they’re responding to the aesthetic. Which is a weird compliment to your work, in a way?
Yeah. There was this thing the other day where an artist copied my — they did the horizontal flip, and like, did their own version with two of the pieces from “Water Magic”. I think that also happens when people don’t necessarily realize that another artist has drawn the original artwork, or painted it.
Right. “This is remix culture! Don’t worry about it!”
Exactly. And I remember she said, “Oh, you know, I could add some more things to it to make it look different.” And I was like, “This is not a generative. We’re not adding traits.”
Is there any part of you that would welcome true derivatives of your work? If someone was like, “I want to riff on a Water Magic piece”. Would that be something you’d find interesting or helpful to the brand you’re building?
I think there are a few things there that are important. I think the first is attribution. So anybody that decides to do something and leaves any kind of attribution out is immediately sus.
And the second is intention. If you want to do fan art, that’s a thing. You know Ramos in in the Crypto Coven Discord? They do a lot of fan art, but they don’t ever forget to attribute it to the witch that they remixed, and to the Crypto Coven project. And they don’t ever try to sell it.
So I guess the question would be, “What is your intention?” Is it that you love the piece of art so much? And you want to imagine more, or you want to pay homage? That’s cool. But then are you going to try to sell it? I don’t know how comfortable I would feel about it for my own work, but I’m sure other artists would be totally down with it. But it is that lack of attribution, the lack of credit, and all of the things that come with it that makes it super sus.
And I don’t think that people realize how hurtful it is.
I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how it feels, especially because it’s not just being taken. It’s being taken and monetized the same way you would monetize your work, through the same channels. What a shitty thing.
I wonder, maybe I should talk to Old King about this. We did something around wallet security, and it could be interesting to do another kind of Twitter space: “How do you spot fake art?” Like your comment about the PFP looking like it’s much cheaper than it should be. What are the questions you should ask yourself as a buyer? And how do you report a fake collection? What are the steps you can take? What can we do around scam collections?
That’s smart. That should exist.
I’ll talk to Old King about it and see if he wants to take on that mantle.
I like it! I know you have to go, so just one last thing: What are you working on next? What’s coming?
Oh, I actually showed a preview today but I’m working on “Water Magic” again.
Are you doing it with Procreate? I saw your tweet about becoming friends with Procreate.
Yeah! So it’s 50/50 now. I really wanted to learn Procreate because I think it provides a level of flexibility that real life traditional work doesn’t always. I’m able to actually experiment a lot more. So what I’m doing now is I’m still drawing on the watercolour paper, and I’m still drawing with my hand and a pencil, but then I’m scanning it and taking it into my iPad, and then adding the colour, adding the mood, creating the environment in Procreate. And I really like it so far.
I can’t wait to see your new work! Thank you so much for doing this.
Of course!
I’ll see you in the Coven Discord.
Yeah!
This conversation has been condensed and edited, but if you want 100% unedited jacknetic all the time, why not follow her on Twitter to keep up with her future investigations and latest drops?
Tw: @____jacklyn
ALSO:
After the first two issues of FUN/1 dropped, a friend poked fun at the length of the conversations in them and asked if I was trying to make web3’s INTERVIEW magazine. And to that friend I say: “Here’s Issue 3’s cover POAP”.
To receive this POAP, please follow @funofone on Twitter and comment on the pinned tweet with your eth address. One person claimed last week’s cover! I bet we could double the POAP pickup this week. I will bet you. Double or nothing or whatever, I don’t know how bets work.
We’ll take a snapshot on Monday, March 28 at noon EST and send POAPs out with next week’s issue.
Until then, I hope you are reassessing the design decisions in your life that are lacking, and trying something new, too.
Fondly,
Fofo
