As a digital artist in 2021, you must be wondering whether tokenizing your work is the right step for you. Well, let me tell you that if you are already familiar with creating art, it’s not that difficult to learn how to create NFT art.
There are various reasons why you should consider tokenizing your work. Maybe because it is not selling as it should, or because you want to enter another space where people appreciate your work or try out something new. Whatever it may be, It is undoubtedly essential for an artist to know and understand the world of NFTs.
The other reason to turn your art into an NFT is that once your physical art sells, you won’t have any control over it. But, if your NFT sells in the secondary market, you earn a royalty every single time the item is sold to another person.
Even if you are new at creating digital art, the NFT market can help you to gain more reputation among other artists while making you a little cash. It can help you build a social media presence as well as create a community around your NFT projects.
We have listed the top 3 reasons why you should tokenize your work:
- Exposure:
By tokenizing your artwork, you can gain access to an entirely new kind of audience with a keen interest in art and investments. Anybody in an NFT marketplace is there because they are looking for art to buy, sell or trade their work.
So, it’s an excellent place to showcase your work and potentially sell a lot of it. It’s different from other platforms like Instagram. On Instagram, the platform has every kind of audience but, on an NFT marketplace, the users are focused on a very specific task, which is finding good art, buying, selling, or trading the same art piece for profit.
- Royalties:
Unless It is a very famous piece, earning royalties from it is near impossible, because you won’t be able to keep track of whether it has been sold to someone else, in the case of NFTs it is transparent on who owns the piece of art at the given time.
As discussed above, once you sell your physical art, you will probably stop earning from that particular piece. However, in the case of NFTs, you can set a royalty percentage, which is the percentage of the total selling price that you will receive after the work is sold in the secondary market.
This makes a good source of passive income; you can keep earning from a piece years after you have actually sold it. This effect is compounded over time and yields huge returns on art that appreciates in value over time.
- Authenticity:
Every token in the blockchain is verified and unique, so your work will act as its own certificate of authenticity.
Even though your work is open to be viewed or downloaded by anyone on the internet, it can only be owned by a specific person at a time. Wherever the piece is bought or sold, the price data, owner list, and other such information travels with the art piece.
Even regular art sold in auctions comes with receipts to prove it’s genuine. So do NFTs with blockchain verifying the authenticity of every piece.
Why do people pay Millions for NFT art?
People pay millions of dollars for an NFT to own the token in the blockchain. It permanently connects the person’s name with the creator’s artwork. An artist needs to know his/ her way around the market, and the type of work collectors and investors both like.
There are two reasons why people pay millions for NFTs:
- As art: people have been assigning value to art for centuries, and the trend has not changed with NFTs.
- As an investment: some people pay millions as an investment so that they can sell the NFT later at a higher value and book the profit.
You, as an artist, can leverage this benefit of the platform and learn how to create NFT art that is both a nice piece to own and hold and serve as an asset for the future.
The reason NFT are valued so high is that in the case of digital art in web 2.0 you don’t sell the digital artwork itself you sell its copy with NTfs it’s unique and so if you own or create a certain NFT, it will be the only one across the internet and that makes it way more valuable compared to duplicable digital files in the web 2.0.
How to create NFT art?
Now that you know that NFTs sell for a lot of money, you need to know how to create NFT art.
We at Idea Usher have made it easy for you by listing 4 step-by-step points to tokenizing your work into an NFT:
1. Set up a Crypto wallet
The first thing that you need to do is set up your crypto wallet. There are various trusted and reliable crypto wallets out there like Rainbow, Metamask, etc.
The most popular crypto wallets are:
For the sake of this article, let’s say you chose Metamask, so what you need to do is download the Metamask app.
Register with your credentials. Then you will get a secret phrase. Which you need to keep safe and secure: if you lose this phrase, you won’t be able to access your wallet.
After you have done that, go to your browser and download the Metamask extension. Sync this extension with the app using the QR code.
2. Buying Ethereum
Ethereum is the blockchain where your art will be made into an NFT; therefore, all transactions in the NFT marketplace will be done via Ethereum or ETH.
The next step is to buy a little bit of ethereum, or ETH. You will need this ETH to pay the gas fees for the NFT marketplace.
What are gas fees?
It is the price you pay to mint your NFT and write it into the ETH blockchain. You can start out by buying $50 or $100 worth of ETH. The gas fees for NFTs are pretty high for now for most good platforms. The gas fee for every token varies with the crypto market.
Next, it’s not really necessary to add ETH, you even have other chains that can be used for minting and they don’t even charge a gas fee. Examples include Polychain, Polkadot, etc.
3. Connect the wallet to an NFT marketplace
This step is crucial to selling your NFT in a marketplace. There are various marketplaces like Rarible, OpenSea, etc.
Register to any NFT marketplace you want, log in with your credentials, and connect your crypto wallet with the marketplace.
This way, you can pay the gas fees with no hassle at all. Also, this will ensure that once your art sells, the crypto enters your wallet easily.
Most popular platforms to create and sell NFTs.
Some of the most popular NFT marketplaces in the United States where you can create NFT art and sell them are:
- OpenSea
- Rarible
- SuperRare
- Foundation
- Atomic Market
4. List your art and turn it into an NFT.
The next step is to create your art, unlike physical art, which comes in the form of a painting or sculpture. NFT marketplaces allow all file types from jpeg, gif, mp4, mp3, and others.
So, you can really work on your forte and create something of high value, also scan the marketplace for trending styles of art. These styles can fetch you a lot of money. After you have made your design, you now need to convert it into an NFT.
You can do that using the marketplace itself. Say you have chosen Rarible as your marketplace. You will need to click on the “create” button on the top-right corner of the home page.
Then you have to choose whether you want to make it a single piece which is a one-of-one art piece, or a “multiple,” which is a collection of similar art.
Once you have chosen your preference, it will give you a form that you need to fill very carefully, along with the art file(s).
Next, you can either set an immediate sell price or send it to an auction. An instant sell price is a fixed price you want for your art. And in an auction, there will be multiple bids, and you can choose to accept or reject a bid.
You will also be provided with a field called “Royalty”, this is a percentage amount that you will receive every time the NFT piece is sold to someone else.
Once you have done all this, you can click on “create item,” it will send a request for payment in your Metamask wallet. As soon as you approve the payment, the minting process will start, and your NFT will be minted in a set amount of time. The cost of minting varies with speed.
You can also sell your work on OpenSea. It is the secondary market for NFTs which means you might be able to get higher prices there if your artwork appreciates in value.
Is the NFT market a bubble?
There has been a lot of buzz lately in the market regarding the NFT bubble, and it is being projected that if the bubble bursts, a huge crash may happen. Well, that is partially true and partially not.
Remember the .com bubble in the early 2000s, the bubble burst and created a huge crash but does that mean internet companies have stopped existing? If anything, it has picked up the pace, and they have gone ahead to reshape the entire world. So, if you learn how to create NFT art properly, it’s really not that difficult.
In a crash, good companies/ artists will survive and the bad ones will be filtered out of the system, so if your work is good enough, then you don’t need to worry about all this. Just go ahead and participate. Share on XAnd, if you are already a digital artist, make sure that you are not solely dependent on the NFT market; you will be selling your art as usual on social media and on websites. This is very important to remember because a market corrects time and again, but it doesn’t mean you won’t enter it.
Conclusion
The “how to create an NFT art” part is easy; whether it will be valuable or not is the primary question. For this, we suggest you research more about the top NFT projects out there.
You might notice that the NFT collections cater to a particular niche. So creating digital art for a particular niche is more appealing in the market. So you need to work out your niche and learn how to make digital art and tokenize them into NFTs for that niche only.
After you have successfully established yourself as a digital artist, you can go ahead and build a community around your NFT projects.
This community building is particularly important if your name is not yet attached to an influencer. This community will support you and will spread the word about your work.
Maintaining a Twitter, Instagram, and Discord presence is essential to the world of NFTs. Especially if your work is good, you need to make sure enough people get to know about it.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q. What software do NFT artists use?
A. You can use softwares like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Canva, etc. However, SketchAR is a mobile app that can be used to turn photos into illustrations.
Q. How can I make money with NFTs?
A. You can either make your own NFTs to sell them online at a marketplace, or you can buy, sell or trade NFTs in an open marketplace using ETH.
Q. How do I upload my artwork to OpenSea?
A. You can open an account with opensea.io, go to their “Create” button and then fill out their form; you will see an “upload” section there.
Q. What is a GLB file?
A. GLB is a 3D file format that’s used in VR, AR, games, and web apps because it supports motion and animation.