How do you Become an NFT Artist?

An NFT artist is a creative content creator who mints their art as digital assets on the blockchain. However, just minting any image or music file and slapping an ETH 0.1 price tag on it won’t cut it to make you an NFT artist, as anyone can do that in theory.
What sets you apart as an NFT artist from the rest of the NFT community is how you interact with your audience, your creative value, and the sales you make from your NFTs.

Let’s take a look at the best ways to become an NFT artist:

What is an NFT artist?

NFT Digital Art from an Instagram portfolio can easily be screenshotted and widely distributed without your consent. NFTs mitigate the plagiarism issue by assigning ownership of digital art.
This ownership is effective thanks to the blockchain, which acts as a public ledger that can be accessed to confirm validity and proof of possession of NFTs.
Being an NFT artist doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily be an illustrator. After all, art is diverse: you could be an NFT musician, NFT illustrator, NFT video game developer.. the list goes on.

For simplicity purposes, we’ll focus on graphic design in this article.

An excellent way to keep your NFTs under the same graphic line is using one software to create them. For example, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or even Canva can help create an NFT art piece.

How to make NFT art?

One of the first things to do is choose your art niche.

Choosing your art niche is to figure out the type of artwork you want to create. A niche of consistent digital art will refine your skills in the niche and let your audience get used to the type of art you create.

Next, you have to decide what kind of file format you’ll be uploading your NFT as. Remember that not all platforms support all types of files.

Here are the most popular ones:

OpenSea: Gif, jpg, png, SVG, mp4, mp3, WebM, wav, glb, ogg, gltf, all with a max size of 100 MB.

Rarible: PNG, GIF, WebP, mp3 o4 MP4. Max size is 10 MB.

Mintable: Any image file format, a MPEG-4 video file, or a GLB file. There can also be 3GB of any file format as bonus content, part of a downloadable file.

Your NFT doesn’t have to be perfect, but it must be consistent. Try to create new art every day as a tactic to get your creative juices flowing every day. This will allow you to become more attuned and passionate with your art.

How to create and sell NFT

To Sell your NFT art, the first step you should follow is registering a crypto wallet that you can connect with an NFT marketplace. An example of a crypto wallet is Metamask, which you can set up in less than ten minutes.

Next, you need to select a blockchain where you’ll like to mint your NFT. The blockchain where you mint it will determine the marketplace where it’ll be later sold.

Mainstream NFT marketplaces usually operate on the Ethereum blockchain, so you’ll also need to purchase some ETH from the crypto exchange to pay for gas fees from listing your NFTs.

Alternatively, you can also undergo lazy minting, though this is a much slower process to mint your NFTs.

Next, you need to select a marketplace. Examples include OpenSea, Rarible, SuperRare, Mintable, and more. We recommend OpenSea, Rarible, and Mintable if you’re starting.

Once you’ve selected your marketplace, it’s time to mint your NFT. When you mint your NFT, you pay a miner’s fee as a transaction to submit your digital art into the blockchain of your choice. For example, if you chose OpenSea, it would be minted on Ethereum.

This has a cost depending on the number of transactions at the time, commonly known as the gas fee. After you have created your NFT and minted it, it’s time to sell it to someone else.

You determine the prices of your NFT, but it’s a clever idea to do quick market research on other artists selling art similar to yours to find out how much they are charging for their NFTs.

Selling your NFTs for a high price without a following will be pretty tricky, so you should focus on setting a price you know your audience can afford.

How to promote your NFT?

The best way to promote your NFT is by using social media. Humans are more interested in NFTs than ever, given all the hype surrounding the profits you can earn from them.

More so, many artists from all walks of life now have the opportunity of minting their digital assets as illustrations.

Here are some benefits of promoting your NFT collection: 

1. Promoting your NFT will attract the attention of buyers. Just minting the NFT isn’t enough.
2. You can create an audience that’ll hype your NFT projects, increasing speculative sales prices.
3. You can also draw the attention of artists who could collaborate with your project in the future.

If you already have a large follower base of your art, let them know that you’ll be joining the world of NFTs and which marketplaces they can purchase your art on. It’s a smart move to leverage any existing audience for your NFT art, but if you don’t have one already, it’s not the end of the world. Below, we have some tips on how you can create one.

Use social media for NFT art.

Each social media channel has a different strategy for NFT artist, so knowing how to use each is essential for an effective promotion strategy.

An excellent way to promote your NFT page on Instagram or Twitter is by using hashtags. Some of the trendiest hashtags on social media include #NFT, #NFTs, #NFTArtist, #DigitalArt, and many more. Twitter is good for NFT airdrops, news, and engaging with the community. It would be best if you searched the #nftgiveaway #nft #nftnews and other NFT related hashtags as ways to help your tweets gain visibility.

Instagram can be used similarly by promoting your work to your followers on your stories and also using the trending NFT hashtags on your posts. It’s even easier if you already have a following on Instagram, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to start. Use giveaways to quickly gain traction and raise the visibility of your NFT artist skills.

Performing giveaways using these hashtags and prompting people to retweet them will help you interact with the community and raise the visibility of your NFT art.

Discord is good for NFT groups and to organize a community around an NFT project. It can be tiring to manage a Discord group, Create a NFT Art, and promote your own NFT art on social media all at once, so it’s a bright idea to outsource part of the work to someone who can be of help.

Create a teaser

Creating a teaser for your project is essential to market your NFTs. The whole point is showcasing the crucial facts about your NFT project without spoiling too much. This isn’t different from a movie trailer: you want to reveal enough to hook your buyers and possible investors.

Many NFTs drop every day, but others promote their drops and collections in advance. A good strategy is to create attention and noise towards your project at least two weeks in advance and start dropping hints on what’s coming on the aforementioned social media channels.

You can also become a collector of NFT artist, which helps you become more involved with other community projects. Share your purchase on your social media, and take the opportunity to share your art to expand your community. This could help you collaborate with more artists in the future.

Study the market

Studying the market is a strategic move if you want to stand out in the world of NFTs. This includes searching for successful projects and analyzing them, deconstructing them, or even interacting with team members to learn what makes them stand out from the crowd.

You don’t have to copy the art style of other projects, but it’s always a smart idea to identify what kind of steps they took to make their project successful.

Did they create a discord group? Did they tease their art on Reddit?

What exactly made their project stand out?

Recognize these patterns and try to weave them into your own project, making it easier for you to promote your NFT art collection.

Final words

Becoming an NFT artist can be fun and get you involved within a creative community. On top of that, you can make a profit if you’re able to consistently deliver and promote your NFT art through social media and NFT marketplaces.

Once you’ve built your audience, it’ll be much easier to sell your NFT art. If you’re interested in becoming an NFT artist and don’t want to break the bank while doing that, check out this guide for tips on how to mint NFTs for free.