This month is the expo of Acty2 and El Xupet Negre at el Instituto de SubCultura en Santurce, Puerto Rico. The exhibition revolves around the idea of Logo Art. Logo Art of course is iconic characters and mascots that transcend branding, marketing, and all together history. One of the collect things about logo art is the versatility of creation that an artist can enjoy with their logo characters. We’re talking all sorts of cool merch, we’re talking promotional material like banners, advertising, tv spots, and in this day in age, we are also talking NFTs.
I won’t be going too into what an NFT is; at this point, you either know already, will never need to know, or are on your way to learning. Just think digital collectible.
Well with the exhibition coming up we wanted to do something animated with Iroki, Acty’s iconic character and we decided on creating 4 animated pieces of art collectible on Opensea. I personally am still not the biggest fan of the Opensea platform and the Ethereum blockchain, but definitely know that an artist such as Acty2 can only be among many of his contemporaries using the Polygon Opensea minting method we went ahead and etched Iroki in digital history.
You can add them to your collection here.
Mabstronauts
After close to 300 Mabstronauts dropped on the Davinci Gallery using the Harmony One Protocol, I gotta say that this is quite fun and that there are of course several different ways to tackle the NFT space. Once you start creating generative art, it’s really not about the art itself. It’s all about creating and nourishing communities. I’ll be honest as always, this is definitely not my forte; I’m more of a look at me, I’m a cool kinda guy, but this project is definitely changing me for the better.
When you start getting holders you start thinking of how you can make their investment even cooler, how you can add value to their lives, and their experience in Web3. You start thinking of “phygital” (physical and digital) integrations for your holders/collectors to experience. Stuff like AR experiences, 3d printed merchandise, metaverses. Really cool stuff indeed, and man my mind is going wild with all the possible cool things I could do. I’m still not settled on anything all the way but right now there are 3 Utilities for the Mabstronauts.
1- Free Random Drops
2- Entry to Physical Item GiveAways
3- Free Access to the Nostalgea Assets by Mabs
The Mabstronauts project and generative arts deserve their own blog post, but let me just show you what we got modeled and 3d printed. One of our holders won the actual figurine but this week all our holders will gain access to the print files so they can make their own as well.
Mushies
Mushies are coming along so well! This is probably one of my favorite projects right now, everything else is really cool but projects closing in on their release date are especially nice! Their value has gone up x2 and only 2/9 are still available. This gives me hope in regards to a future where I can create more character design projects based on a theme and create new characters and actually monetize them. Of course, the question of copyright comes to mind, but at least for the Mushies as long as I get to use my characters as well, I’m happy to share the copyright with the holder of the specific character. Figured it is a good idea to put it in writing so my holders know that they are free to make stickers and other stuff with the art they hold of mine. They do not have exclusive rights because I’m still the original creator but as long as you credit me you can sell derivatives of your purchased NFT characters. Speaking of derivatives, I want to tell you about the end goal of this project.
The goal of the Mushies project is not to just create and sell the nfts but to ultimately release a booklet of the collected characters along with small stories to be sold on Amazon. The special surprise is that all our holders will receive a free pdf download of the book and once the book is out and the collection has sold out we will be giving away printed versions of the book along with extra goodies.
Closing Thoughts
It’s very interesting, even though all the money I’ve made or invested into Harmony One has gone to Defi, now that I have the coinbase card I’m excited to actually see these projects start paying for more improvements in my life. I’ve always had dreams of creating art for a living, and while I’ve been a full-time artist since I was 18, it’s always been freelance art that pays the bills. Being able to create my own projects, and fund them while I build them, all while creating a network of collectors for the final products is really wonderful. I’ve been trying the nft environment for about 6 months now and the amount of support I’ve received has been amazing, there are so many wonderful people in this space and I can’t wait to keep growing along with all of them and making the harmony one blockchain bigger and greater with my endeavors. If anything I want you to take away from this series of blogs is that all this new technology is worth doing the research, whether you join in or not, do the research first and then figure out if this is for you or not.
MabsArts 