— Issue #3
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​Read this newsletter in 'light mode'

I know many digital artists in the NFT space today who, like me, mainly worked for musicians at first. For a while, I thought that was the only way to make a living from digital art.

I started learning design tools like Photoshop and Adobe just for fun — making visuals for a gaming clan I was part of when I was 14. By the time I was 16, I was creating cover art, lyric videos, and social posts for my musician friends. I was having fun making digital art and earning a little money from it. That’s when the dream of living fully from creating started to take shape.

For a long time, I thought what I was making were artworks. I didn’t really know the difference between design, solving problems through visuals, and art as expression, or as practice, or as something even bigger.

In fact, I had no experience with the traditional art world at all before NFTs. We all know this space is a kind of bubble, just a tiny fraction of the art world. Sometimes it’s easy for us inside to understand its particularities, but for many people outside, it’s not.

I worked on a lot of cover art and music videos (search 'omentejovem' on YouTube and you’ll see some of them), mostly for people in my city and state. That design work gave me a little money enough to buy things for myself, have some fun, and reinvest but I knew it wasn’t much. I wanted better tools and a better life. Back then I was working on my older brother’s computer, only when he wasn’t using it.

I also knew that some Brazilian artists and designers were already working internationally, earning in dollars — which meant five times more than what I was making in Brazil. That’s when I started a new Twitter account under the name “omentejovem,” hoping to find international clients.

Through Twitter group chats I connected with other designers and artists — people like Etiene Crauss, CYDR, Femzor, Occult3d, Tchaggo, DyingKyoto, almightyDJAK, and many more.

Then I saw Etiene Crauss make a sale on SuperRare, and I was both confused and curious. Why would someone pay that much for a digital file? I wondered if the buyer was getting the rights to the artwork — maybe to use it as a cover or something?

Etiene sent me an article about NFTs by Loopify, and suddenly it clicked. It was like a CS:GO skin, but instead of buying a game skin, you were buying the artist’s work as a digital object on the blockchain. Okay… interesting.

He blessed me with some ETH to mint my first artwork. I created SQUDVV? and it sold the very next day for $122 (0.36 ETH). That was the same amount I used to make in a whole month doing design work, even with a full schedule.

As you can see in the image below, his wallet was the one that funded mine:

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I stopped everything else I was doing to focus on NFTs and finally bring my own ideas to life. I was tired of making cover art, of having my ideas set aside for what other people wanted (which was fair, since I was being paid to design for their songs, but still…).
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In 2022, I bought back my very first artwork for 1.11 ETH from Matrix — a collector who had (and maybe still has) a lot of artists’ genesis pieces from late 2020 and early 2021.

I think it’s important to highlight this more: TODAY, so many artists are powered by the blockchain to create their most honest, personal work - without having to fit into someone else’s idea or purpose.

It’s powerful to realize that crypto investors and believers are supporting artists simply by owning their works. A whole new form of currency is meeting a whole new way of owning digital art. I don’t think we stop to reflect on this enough, and I really want to bring attention to it.

I know we’re still very early in this space, because we don’t talk enough about it. I don’t see many people here connecting artists to the bigger picture, or talking about the cultural evolution that’s been happening for years now. But it’s real. Huge cultural assets are being created right now by people who follow their desires and just make it happen. You and I might not fully understand it all the time, but it is happening — right now.

Take CYDR, for example. Respectfully, I prefer the CYDR below to the CYDR above. I’ve loved watching their process since the start of their NFT career, and it’s clear how much they’ve been evolving. There’s something magical in this kind of documentation — in aesthetics that keep unfolding — because it gives us both something to feel and something to reflect on.

A lot happens when a collector supports an artist with vision, desire, and the will to make it real. There’s so much still to explore in the digital medium — and even more in the fact that these works are recorded (likely, hopefully) forever on the blockchain. That permanence means our stories can survive longer, leaving a mark on humanity and maybe on 'digital humanity', if that’s what the future brings.

Collectors, artists, curators, platforms… it’s also a kind of cult. We love being here, we celebrate, we share our symbols and our language. And before I wrap up, I want to share with you firsthand: I’ll be releasing Cult, a one-of-one, soon. It tells a story about our space, a personal experience, and of course: crypto.
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I want to finish this newsletter giving a big shout out to all the readers, to Etiene Crauss, CYDR, and Femzor specifically, and to all the digital artists around the world who have found their home in web3, crypto art, and beyond.
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Take some time to look at their works. You won’t regret it — there are so many gems out there waiting to be loved and discovered.
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— omentejovem