As NFTs grow in popularity in the Caribbean, many artists are finding new opportunities to sell their art and reach new audiences.
Nicholas Huggins, a Trinidadian artist, is one of those who have jumped into the new platform and found a way to monetize the work he previously displayed at no cost through social media.
NFT is an acronym for Non-Fungible Tokens. Immutable means that the asset is non-transferable and is unique unlike a fungible asset like money or bitcoin that can be exchanged for another just like them.
NFTs are primarily sold through a type of cryptocurrency called Ethereum and when someone buys an NFT they are buying a digital certificate of ownership of that particular asset. The purchase is made and recorded on a blockchain platform to confirm ownership of the item.
Art, photos, videos, music and documents can all be uploaded to a blockchain platform as an NFT.
Huggins was in the national spotlight last year when he designed the artwork for Kes The Band’s live album, We Home. The artwork formed the basis for the background for the band’s televised concerts as well.
Most recently, he was contracted to create the artwork for a limited edition mug celebrating 10 years of McDonald’s in Trinidad and Tobago.
Huggins was convinced to explore NFTs when Stephen Hadeed and Stephanie Telemaque, two friends who are very passionate about NFTs, told him that his artwork would be a good fit. He had just finished an alphabet chart with all the characters illustrated as local architecture.
“I did 50 limited edition prints that I sold and I thought that would be a good piece to start with, but honestly I had a lot to learn,” he told Loop News.
His friend, Sekani Solomon, a motion designer whose work has been featured in Black Panther and for Cash-App, invited him to join the Foundation, an invitation-only marketplace for NFTs.
“I dropped it there in May and started researching and doing a deep dive and in October I got an offer, it took five, six months for that offer. When someone makes a bid, it triggers a 24-hour auction and it sells for about 0.22 Ethereum which is about $950 at today’s rate, so I said now there’s proof of concept, let me work on a collection,” said Huggins.
Huggins’ work reflects cultural aspects of Trinidadian life and seeing one of his popular collections depicting vendor booths around the Queen’s Park Savannah, he decided to place a flag for T&T in the NFT space by drawing elements from that creation to form a sub-collection featuring beers and other elements with puns on NFT slang.
A bottle of Stag, for example, has the word JPEG instead of the name while a bottle of Banks beer has the words Bank Less. He also created a gas tank with the word Ethereum on it.
Huggins sold the beers and other derived pieces through OpenSea as a collection, while the main artworks were sold as one piece at a time.
The collection went live, I created a waiting list and between Sunday and Monday I got 17 individual piece sales, 30 percent of the collection sold, and someone bid on one of the pieces that started a 24-hour auction. process,” he said.
The collection has so far raised 0.47 Ethereum on sale which is around USS2000 while that of one piece sold for 0.3 Ethereum.
“I’ve been illustrating a lot over the last eight to nine years. NFTs have given me an opportunity where I could monetize work I’ve done for free, it seems like a natural progression. It’s about years and years of work and building an audience, so this is the next natural progression. There isn’t mass adoption yet, but I wanted to be an early adopter and put my work on those platforms now, so when it reaches mass adoption, I’d be one of the first to do that kind of work,” he said about the opportunities offered by NFTs.
He expressed gratitude to those already in the NFT space – Wyatt Gallery, Anya Ayoung Chee, Kiwan Landreth-Smith, Mark Pereira, Stephen Hadeed, Stephanie Telemaque and others who offered advice and helped him along the way.
“Regardless of how it was marketed, how it was priced, how it got into the collection, there was a lot of help along the way. One of the most amazing things about NFTs is the community aspect, everyone is super helpful and super open and everyone wants to see everyone do well,” he said.
His advice to those looking to get into the NFT space is to do their research.
“Do as much work as you need to do to get started, do your research for a month or two and learn all the technical things you need to know in terms of how blockchain technology works and also what kind of work in the market. is answering it.”
