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Instagram isn’t a great place for displaying digital art, says artist OMGiDRAWEDit. The quality is too low, and the app doesn’t let pieces shine. But it was Instagram that offered inspiration for OMGiDRAWEDit to get into creating NFTs when they saw the work of some fellow digital artists that had been posted to Instagram, minted as NFTs.
“I saw some stuff on SuperRare and it was very cool,” they said. But initially, they were hesitant to get on the NFT bandwagon due to the environmental concerns surrounding some blockchains. “A few other artists I followed on Twitter set up a clean NFT Discord and so I joined that.”
OMGiDRAWEDit then discovered Tezos, a Proof of Stake blockchain with significantly lower energy use than comparable Proof of Work blockchains. “I investigated a bit further and then just went for it and minted my genesis piece,” they said.
Artist MVK followed a similar path. They saw some big NFT sales on Christie’s at the beginning of 2021 and wanted to know more about NFTs as an artistic medium. “I realized this is huge and so real and I jumped into it."
“I had a fight with time because I had to quickly release NFTs and so I tried to promote [my work] with marketing,” they continued.
Twitter is the most powerful medium for promoting digital art and creating a community around creators and artwork, says OMGiDRAWEDit and MVK. “So, for me personally I just kind of started tweeting out the pieces with the link to the NFT,” says OMGiDRAWEDit.
“I think that I was quite fortunate that both in the moment of that happening Hic et Nunc as a platform was like, really blowing up as well. I think it kind of went crazy from March just onwards and I think I got in pretty early which was really helpful, but I’ve always just tried to be totally honest and be myself when I tweet about my work. A lot of my pieces are quite tied to me personally.”
MVK agrees, saying they try to approach every job as a mini exhibition. They post on Twitter and send the post to key people and friends, asking for retweets. “I also send a lot of messages to potential collectors; nothing too pushy, but just ‘hey man, I’m releasing new work, come check it out. I don’t have a huge following, and that is the way it works for me.”
The blockchain platform also has massive potential to expose new artists, says OMGiDRAWEDit. “The kind of culture of art that’s coming through is just unbelievable and there’s just so much stuff that I’d never seen or never considered that I think I probably never would have if I hadn’t been sort of getting into the NFT scene,” they said.
However, OMGiDRAWEDit says there are issues with collectors using bots and scripts to get in early on drops, crowding out other collectors and relegating them to the more expensive secondary market. “Maybe as things become more mainstream there’s going to be a lot of people that are just trying to enter the space or dip their toes, want to maybe collect something they really like and they can’t because it’s scooped up from under them by somebody that has tools that favor them,” they said.
Both artists say the blockchain operates on blockchain time, where a year is compressed into a month, and a month into a day. “We’re joking with my friends that NFTs never sleep so we don’t as well… So, NFTs helped me do less design work. I now focus more on my art and the idea is to keep focusing more and more on my art,” says MVK.
OMGiDRAWEDit agrees. “I feel like I’ve worked myself almost to the bone for the last seven months [and so] I’m at a point where I’m sort of trying to not take a step back from NFTs, but kind of give myself a little bit more of a chance to catch my breath,” they said. “I think you can get so involved so heavily and it’s such an amazing community and a world that is just all totally crazy, but it’s also super consuming.”
