Every day there are roughly 600 commits to the Base Blockchain that are expressed as pixels making up the BasePaint canvas. These contributions of pixels come from hundreds of different people at all hours from all over the globe. Every 24 hours, the canvas is locked, the palette and theme changes, and the BasePaint artists get to work on a fresh canvas.

Now, each BasePaint canvas is 144 x 144 pixels in size, for a total of 20 736 pixels. If you, as a brush holder, commit 100 pixels to the canvas in hour 1 of the theme, it is unlikely that any of your pixels will wind up on the final form that locks at the end of hour 24. Fortunately, the BasePaint smart contract still ensures that you will be compensated with a share of the proceeds when the final canvas is minted but, artists have their pride, and it is never painless to see your contributions buried under others.

But because all of these pixels are written to the Base blockchain, they are preserved forever under the strata of data like the fossils of extinct species. Any palaeontologist with time and luck to spare could find them again, separate them from the matrix in which they are embedded, dust them off, and perhaps indulge in some educated reconstruction.

It is precisely this practice that is done to produce the BasePaint Masterpieces - collections of pixels rescued from the blockchain by a small team of dedicated BasePaint historians. There are five of us, and we each pick a subsection of BasePaint Days to work on. One of the days I picked for the recent second collection of Masterpieces was Day 190 - Vegetable Battle.

Vegetable Battle is one of my favourites, and I was pretty involved with it on the day it was active, 15th of February 2024. It had 581 commits by 478 artists, and I was putting down contributions at the start of the day and the end of the day, so I felt I had a good handle on which pieces to curate for the seven Masterpieces of Day 190.

I drew one of the central battlers, an aubergine person throwing a blow towards the karate carrot (or possibly a sweet potato) put down on the canvas first thing by the incomparable Bombadilus. That fight became the central Vegetable Battle of the day, so it made sense to include it.

I took the aubergine character from my initial commit, excluding the face that came afterwards, mainly because I felt a faceless aubergine was a funnier antagonist for the carrot to face.

However, I used deguma’s later additions to the carrot person, with a redrawn face and slightly different posture, which made the carrot look more like they were blocking the aubergine opponent’s blow. I retained the original detail of the carrot person holding a wicked looking sword, because I always enjoy the aesthetic of fighting games where one character is brandishing a weapon that ought to give them a ridiculous advantage.

The next element to include was Dean Harvey’s classic fighting game overlay of health bars, character names and a timer. The timer included the day number as an added bonus. Zenben later added apples as ‘round win tokens,’ which showed that this match was evenly matched.

Throughout day 190, the names of the opponents changed in rapid succession, the work of several 100 pixel brushes. It’s always a treat to find these animations in the history of a canvas, and I loved the creativity of the names flashing past. None of them quite matched up with these characters I was isolating, and sadly I couldn’t think of anything as fun as ‘Genius Okra’ but I retained the font and style and named the characters ‘Carrot’ and ‘Brinjal’ (as aubergine is too long and I will die before I call the fruit of the nightshade an eggplant.)

Next there was the figure between the fighters. Danielailustra had contributed an excellent avocado referee to the scene, and I thought that character deserved its own Masterpiece. Also, the presence of a referee implied something more sporting and gentlemanly than I wanted this scene to be.

So I used an earlier character that I had made - some kind of child tomato that was aghast at the fight.

The next element I wanted to include was the crowd, some of which made it to the final canvas. The crowd represented one of the most exciting things about BasePaint - someone starts an idea, and other people run with it.

Bombadilus started with a silhouette of these two people spectating the battle.

Doctoridris added this character to the crowd. Another aubergine? Whose side are they on?

These characters were added by a group of 100 pixel brushes - jopa-vonyaet, xosepa05, david-travila, hapaemyavno. I added a few little tweaks and placed them in front of Carrot and Brinjal.

So the finished Masterpiece is a 1/1 which included contributions from me, Bombadilus, Dean Harvey, Zenben, DoctorIdris, jopa-vonyaet, xosepa05, david-travila and hapaemyavno with honourable mention to Danielailustra. It clarifies a central scene from the final canvas of Vegetable Battle while pulling many elements from throughout its development.

Ticklish is an artist on Blitkin, polys-art, gamma.io and Creature Feature and has been contributing to BasePaint since the first day. Ticklish’s current project, ‘The Ghosts That Haunt Me’ is currently minting on Highlight.