My dream has been to make money from my art. It has been one of my oldest dreams or desires, but it has never manifested. However, today for the first time I am investigating the wonderful world of NFTs or non-fungible tokens. I want to tokenize my art pieces on the blockchain and sell them for crypto. This could be revolutionary and a dream-come-true, if I can overcome the learning curve.

For years I have been making paper collages from cut out pictures and glue. At one point about three years ago I had about 50 art pieces in my portfolio, all original cut-and-paste collages, about A3 size. Unfortunately there was a historic fire that destroyed my entire rental home (and 1000 other houses in two towns here) and all my possessions, including my portfolio of art works.

I gave up for three years but this year I have resumed making collage art pieces once more. So far this year I have about 8 collages, all made over the past few months. And since I’m a crypto enthusiast, I have been exploring the blockchain world and technology, so know about the concept of NFTs or non-fungible tokens.

NFTs are mostly found in gaming nowadays, where gamers can buy in-game items and now store them or keep them permanently as NFTs to build up a collection or to sell later. The most popular NFTs are the original Cryptokitties. They were launched on the Ethereum platform a couple of years ago.

Besides that, I have investigated Opensea briefly. But now I have found the Hive blockchain also has just as much to offer as Ethereum regarding the Dapps and facilities available for creating NFTs and even new personalized cryptocurrencies of our own. So today I am diving for the first time into the world of digital art and NFTs, and how precisely to get my physical paper artwork into digital format, and then into NFT format.

It’s an exciting learning curve for me and is really keeping my brain fit. If I can succeed in this challenge, I will be able to finally realize my dream of selling my artworks for money – in this case cryptocurrency – from which I can sustain my livelihood. The new world of digital currency and even more, of blockchain-based digital assets of all kinds, is a growing one and set to be the way of the future.

For now I have come across the positive progress in this field of NFT digital art done by @juliakponsford and her NFT art gallery https://peakd.com/@nftshowroom/posts. There is also a website where artists can exhibit our work as NFTs and actually sell them to interested buyers or collectors https://nftshowroom.com/. The gallery takes a small commission of about 10%, which is normal, and I can sell my art pieces as one-off items or I can make prints – as many as I want – to offer for sale on the blockchain.

All this is possible thanks to blockchain, where the open and distributed ledger technology is finding newer and newer use cases, even to timestamp digitalized artworks for exhibition and sale. Such is the power and promise of blockchain tech. And this very facility allows the artist to claim authenticity because the timestamp shows the original source. Any attempted plagiarism or theft of my art is impossible once it has been timestamped as the original.

I will keep you informed in my coming blog updates, on how successful I am in navigating the NFT world, as well as how my dream of selling my own artworks for money unfolds. I’m not that tech savvy, so can’t guarantee my success yet, but the potential is here at my fingertips. Regardless of the outcome, I will continue making my original collage artworks, adding to my portfolio.

Making these artworks is a passion of mine and I have enough of an eye for composition and color to appreciate the art pieces even technically, and know that they are fairly decent. So far it’s art for art’s sake, and for my own personal enjoyment. Let’s see if I can take this to the next level.