It’s a historic day for me – I just sold my first ever NFT digital art piece. I have been making paper collage artworks for some years, on and off, yet I have never sold any...until today. You can imagine how epic this is for an amateur artist, ie one who does it for the love of it, not as a professional. All my life I have imagined how glorious I would feel if I could make art and sell my art to earn money. And today that dream has come true.
It's one small step for a man...one giant leap for NFT art.
All this has been facilitated by blockchain technology using cryptocurrency. My art works are handmade, from found paper pictures cut out of magazines. I then glue the pictures onto a piece of hard paper and thus produce a new image, remixed and hybridized out of the old pictures. The end result is completely new.
Then I scan the picture into a digital format and upload it onto the gallery website www.nftshowroom.com/julianhorack/gallery. I have uploaded four of my works so far over the past few days, and made three prints available for sale of each work. None of the first three had any buyers but today – as Mercury goes stationary or appears to stop in the night sky (within 4 degrees of my natal sun), from earth’s point of view, ready to go direct or forward once more – I uploaded my fourth image and within 8 minutes I had a buyer for one of the three prints.
I have priced them at various levels, since I’m still testing the waters and feeling my way into the world of selling my art to collectors. They range from 108 Hive ($30) for some at the time of launch, down to 33 Hive ($10) depending on which print it is. And today the most recent upload sold for 33 Hive. It’s not much but it is a momentous leap for my art career in that it’s a first.
All this has been facilitated by the Hive blockchain which is linked to the nftshowroom.com digital art gallery online. Here people can see the art works up on display for sale from all sorts of fine artists, and for an entire range of prices. And they can pay for the art in cryptocurrency, in this case Hive coin. We simply transfer the stipulated amount of coins from our wallet to the seller, and the digital art print is unlocked for us to receive.
With the power of blockchain technology, all the transactions are recoded on the open distributed ledger, from the initial upload by the artist, where they officially “tokenize” their artwork, through to putting any number of prints up for sale, and then all the way to the purchase by the collector. Every part of the digital journey of the artwork is monitored and recorded.
As a result there is no room for forgery, theft or underhand behavior, so to speak. The history of the artwork is tracked. And this transaction record allows any other artist or collector to see the history of the work and know how valuable it is, or what it originally sold for and how much it was purchased for at each and every transaction through multiple trades or deals.
Now earning the equivalent of $10 for my artwork may not appear to be much, but firstly I’m in a third world country where $1 is worth ZAR14 at present, so $10 is perhaps worth more to me here, as far as purchasing power goes. Secondly, I earned the payment in Hive coin, so I actually have 30 Hive coins (3 went to the gallery as a fee), and these Hive coins are currently climbing in value as a cryptocurrency asset or token. Thus by holding these coins in my digital wallet and not selling them immediately, I can be assured of earning even more for them. For example, Hive coin has already doubled in value this year alone, in the past two months. I expect it to double again or 3x during the course of the coming months.
If this works out as expected, since the entire cryptocurrency market is currently in a bulllish uptrend this year, then my 30 Hive will be worth 3x more in coming months, taking my earnings from $10 to $30 for that one digital NFT print. So in this way my earnings from art sales on the blockchain can actually be a worthwhile income.
Naturally I’m greatly incentivized to now create more such collage artworks in my studio, so that I can digitalize them and upload them onto my gallery page at the NFT Showroom. In this way I am literally creating my own token, which is the same as a coin, or a cryptocurrency. Each artwork is a single, one-off non-fungible token. In other words, it’s not like any other token. Fungible means that one token or coin is worth just as much as any other in the series. One dollar is worth the same as any other dollar bill, or coin. One bitcoin or Hive coin is worth the dame as any other bitcoin or Hive coin.
But non-fungible token means it is unique. Now the artists at NFT Showroom can make prints for sale – as many as they want – 3 or 30 or 300 for example, of each original artwork. But the more prints or copies are made available, the less they are worth. This is because they lose scarcity and are less rare if there are more editions of the artwork. It’s like printing more dollar bills – you simply devalue all the other dollar bills already in circulation. That’s what is going on today in most countries, where their central banks are simply printing masses of their paper fiat currency, while backing it with nothing. It leads to a weakening of the entire currency.
Well with my limited edition of three prints for each original collage made in my studio, I am keeping the value high by keeping the prints scarce. Naturally art collectors will be happy to buy a work that they like, and may even be traders who wish to sell it later for a profit. This is going on at the NFT Showroom among artists and collectors. In this way we have a healthy free market economy where price discovery is keeping the value fair for all concerned.
With the advent of blockchain technology, everything can be tokenized. We can all become artists who can sell our work on the digital blockchain gallery website. I’m off to my studio to make more collage artworks to turn into NFTs (non-fungible tokens). This is my dream come true today where I earn currency for my original creative art content, not just the written word. My career as an artist has finally dawned. Today I’m the person I always dreamed I could one day be. My time has come. How about yours?