Abstract is a blockchain built by the same team behind Pudgy Penguins, so when their testnet campaign launched through MVHQ, we knew we had to do something fun. The result was the ‘Pudgy Lisa’—a tongue-in-cheek tribute to both the NFT brand and The Louvre.

I had just gotten back from Paris, and the museum visit stuck with me. I trained a custom LoRA on Pudgy Penguins artwork, then used Stable Diffusion and ControlNet to reimagine the Mona Lisa as a penguin. After some heavy Photoshop touch-ups and worldbuilding in Flux, she found her way onto the walls of a digital Louvre.

I edited the final piece in After Effects, blending AI-generated realism with subtle compositing and effects to make the space feel tangible. The campaign itself went huge—over 500k NFTs minted during the mission. It ended up being one of the most technically fun projects I’ve done, and a great exercise in using AI to build a world that shouldn’t exist, but somehow does.