Donny Clutterbuck: 10,000 Faces, 1 Hand
Soda is complete: 10,000 hand-drawn pixel portraits by 1 artist, a profile picture collection that treats a human being as the generative algorithm.
"I couldn't think of one piece or group that said enough on its own," Donny Clutterbuck wrote on October 21, introducing Soda with a 15 second loop that runs through all 10,000 pieces in order. Made with Sanj of Fomojis, the video plays less like a teaser than a census: faces, crowns, hats, grids and static flicking past, every one of them drawn by hand. The new site for the collection, soda.delivery, puts the premise in 2 lines: "10,000 hand-drawn pixel art pieces. 1 human."
Soda borrows the format of the 10k profile picture collection and takes the machine out of it. Where those projects usually assemble traits with code, Clutterbuck describes Soda as a hand-drawn 1 of 1 set that "treats a human being as a generative algorithm" and "pushes the limits of pfp coherence." The portraits keep a family resemblance while palettes, patterns and textures swing wildly from piece to piece, so the question of what holds 10,000 drawings together becomes the subject of the work.
Getting there took a year of full-time drawing. On September 24 he posted a progress bar at 100% and asked, "The process really is the product isn't it?" Near the end he spent several days working in uncommon states, with his right hand (he is a lefty), upside down and more, to see how the outcome changed, checking items off what he called the "soda bucket list." The project also inspired his essay 10k Keystrokes, written to exactly 10,000 keystrokes. When the first 9,000 pieces were fed to different AI models with a request for 1,000 more, he reported, the results were mostly collage, with little in the way of coherent novelty.
Because the collection was made sequentially, Clutterbuck notes that viewing it in order is "a very different journey," and batches can be seen onchain in their native layout through ordinals.com and ord.net. Soda will be shown at The Bearded Travelers Artist Corner in the Adobe Room at the Lumberyard in Marfa, October 23 and 24, during Art Blocks Marfa Weekend.
Sources
- Donny Clutterbuck, Soda loop, October 21, 2026
- Donny Clutterbuck, Marfa, October 21, 2026
- Donny Clutterbuck, September 24, 2026
- Donny Clutterbuck, 10k Keystrokes, September 24, 2026
- Donny Clutterbuck, September 15, 2026
- Donny Clutterbuck, October 14, 2026
- SODA
- The Artist Corner, The Bearded Travelers
- Thumbnail: Soda loop still, Donny Clutterbuck and Sanj