Digital Artwork. Blockchain. ETH. and OpenSea — what do they all have in common?

There is a step-by-step guide to creating art on the blockchain at the end

If you are an artist or designer then you understand the problems that digitalisation and digital copying can bring. The blockchain could be the answer for you, read on to find out how things can change now.

The historical problem with digital art and designs

The problems surrounding digital art and designs are well known and documented. Struggling artists and creators can easily relate to this — because its sadly true. The artist profession has been on a decline for the last 50 years while the volume of art has been steadying increasing in the last 20 years. It’s just so hard to sell art and designs digitally when digital items can be so easily copied. Furthermore, as a buyer, why would you spend money on digital art and designs when there are so many other options (usually copies or original pieces) out there. Making a copy can be as simple as taking a screenshot or downloading a copy of the image. Which means to an artist — there is no way to know if there is only one copy or a billion copies of this file. For an online buyer there is no way to know if the print or quality is an original. Between these two big problems is the central issue behind digital artwork and why you don’t own a rare file. Have you ever even heard of that term before? ‘Rare file’?

However with the development and proven success of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) this is set to change. NFTs are digital items on the blockchain. Lets say that again in a different way — NFTs are items (like a sword, cat, or file) that are stored as tokens — on the blockchain.

The key to NFTs is that they allow you to prove authenticity, prove ownership, and create digital scarcity — all things that can help protect and improve the value of digital art. NFTs have grown in popularity since being used in crypto games but now their use cases are spreading into other industries, with art being one of these. If you want to learn more about art on the blockchain check out this great article by Evan Keast from Dapper Labs

and if you want to read more about NFTs and digital items read that.

Now putting art on the blockchain is fairly new, these digital items have only been around for around a year now, however it is a rapidly growing market. The most popular exchange to sell items is https://opensea.io (go brows the items, check them out its kind of cool).

It is no coincidence that dApps focused on digital (and physical) art are popping up all over the place as well — offering items from various artists and designers. Most of all of these places control the smart contract on the blockchain for you though — meaning you really don’t own or control your digital items. But as activity grows there are strong reasons to get involved and a growing market making it a great time to make and sell art. Besides art, the use cases are growing everyday. Eventually people will be buying NFTs at stores (they are already being used with PS4 games, and as physical collectible cutie animals)

Why use Mintable for your digital art and designs?

(note: Mintable has no token, has no ICO, and never will — we are trying to improve the Ethereum ecosystem by developing the easiest way for you to interact with NFTs)

Mintable is a dApp that’s designed to be your home for digital items. Built into Mintable is a powerful Smart Contract Generator that allows you to mint your very own Smart Contracts on the blockchain that you own and have complete control over. Mintable removes all the coding and simplifies making a smart contract. Meaning— Mintable simplifies the process of getting your item onto the blockchain and making it authentic and provably rare.

What does this mean for you?

It means that within minutes you can mint NFTs for your digital art or designs ,without needing to know how to code or understand blockchain technology.

Any item you make on Mintable can be listed on OpenSea, The Y-Combinator backed NFT exchange, right away. So you can mint NFTs for your art and designs on Mintable then sell them on OpenSea.

Many artwork exchanges require you to be registered and approved. But Mintable allows anyone to sell their art and designs and will have you up in running in minutes.

Although, putting your artwork on Mintable isn’t going to solve all of the problems we discussed earlier right away — it is still possible that people can digitally copy it. But it is a great start because using the blockchain you have an immutable ledger that can prove ownership, track where NFTs go, and control access. All this means that your art has now become an asset which is trackable, transferable, and has value. You can restrict who buys it, you can restrict where its sold, when its sold, how much it sells for, you have complete control. You can publicly list your contract’s specific address and then if any art of yours appears on another token that is not on your contract- it can be immediately outted as a copycat token.

On top of this Mintable is also an NFT manager, so as well as making NFTs, you can manage and interact with all the NFTs you create right from within Mintable. Mintable gives you full control over all your NFTs. We don’t own or hold any of them — its all connected to whatever wallet you are choosing to use to browse Mintable.app

Minting and Creating Your Art Step by Step

Before you Start

If you are new to blockchain you will need to do a couple of things. If you already have this nailed you can jump to the next step first:

Install Metamask — Link or use a mobile wallet like Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet Set up your wallet and load it with ETH — You can buy ETH directly via metamask via https://coinbase.com — guide to set up your wallet

Step 1: think about your art

Choose the art you want to tokenize and how many you want to release. By only making a few pieces official — it makes them more valuable of course — but you making a thousand for $2 each might be more reasonable. Depends on your art.

You’ll need a way to display publicly that your art is found at contract address: XYZ. Its like an ID number in a way — you need to have a way for people to look up your contract and say — “yep this is the right one, this is Picasso’s contract”.

The best way to accomplish this is to put the address of your contract (which you will get after you make it) on your website somewhere. So plan out how you want to let people know your art is ONLY at contract XYZ. Then you will also include your website (or wherever they can find it) within the tokenized art — so that — if someone sees or owns the art they can verify it is real by using the information you included.

If you are confused — here is an easy example:

You list your art for sale on Piccasso.com — this is your website. You make your art as a blockchain version and when you finish that process you’ll be given an address for your contract. Then you update Piccasso.com to display that contract address somewhere on the homepage: “Verify all my art is real — its only on [Contract Address Here]” so users can see it. Now its public and can be checked.

If you are super advanced: you can actually just program your website to check if the user owns your token and if so: do X.

Step 2: Create a Smart Contract (time: ~1 min)

Using the UI on Mintable you can create your contract without needing to know how to code. Here is what an art store would look like if you were going to tokenize your art.

Creating my Picasso Contract to hold my art

Go through and add any information you think is related or relevant for your project or buyers to know. You have 20 fields of data that could include:

contract information

instructions on where to see your art

terms and services

links to your website to verify its legit

special code that verifies data in some way

After its confirmed and looking good — submit your transaction via metamask.

You just made a smart contract in this step — that contract has a unique address that no other contract will ever have — this is called the contract address — you can manage your token at anytime by going to: https://mintable.app/manager/-YourContractAddressHere-

This address is provided to you in many forms after you complete the transaction. This is the address you will need to display on your site. This is also the address you can use to interact with your contract.

Step 2: Mint your art tokens (time: ~2mins)

After you have confirmed your ethereum transaction you will have an email copy — and also a screen that present a receipt page. There is a “manage now button” you can click to directly manage your contract.

Load your token in the manager by either:

going directly to it via the url style above (mintable.app/manager/address)

going to your profile and seeing your history then pressing manage

Finding it via the contract address on the search page

Searching for it via browse with the name of the contract

Once loaded you’ll be able to do this…

Going to mint 5 tokens at a time because I only picked 5 batch minting

Here is where you make your prints for each artwork. When you mint a token, you include the data for that token. So if you only wanted to make one copy of the Mona Lisa — ever — you’d only make ONE Mona Lisa token. If you wanted 50 prints — you’d make 50 Mona Lisa tokens.

There are 20 other fields you can use to help improve the scarcity or authenticity of your work

After you submit the transaction and it has been confirmed on the blockchain you will have 25 new tokens in your wallet.

25 of these….. ouch

These are also automatically added on OpenSea.io — the leading exchange to buy and sell NFTs (digital items)

Step 3: Go to Opensea and sell away! (time: ~5mins)

Now that you are done minting tokens — you can go to opensea.io and search for your contract’s name — or go directly to your contract using a link like this: https://opensea.io/assets/-contractAddressHere-/0

Here you can set the price for the sale — and then share the link to buy it. Thats it. Your done.

Its that simple within 8 minutes you’ve created a smart contract and tokens a digital items on the blockchain. How cool!

An item for sale from a user on Mintable.app

👏🎉Use the Beta!!!🎉👏

Website — https://mintable.app

Educational Blog on NFTs — blog.mintable.app

Discord — https://discord.gg/fUEmc8d

Email — zach@mintable.app

Events — We will be at many events in the next coming weeks in Asia. If you are going to any of the asian blockchain conferences, please reach out to us and lets meet up!