First NFT - Jellies

Hello Strangers! How have you been? Am I taking monthly gaps between my posts now? No, no. It was never my plan, but I needed to stop everything for a while to be able to create anything at all again. Have you ever found yourself at the foot of the mountain, you look at it, and you get scared that you will never reach the top? That is what happened. I was staring at a couple of those at the same time as well. I felt tiny and helpless. I needed to do something else for a while.

So one day I picked up my Cintiq 16 tablet again and began testing different tools on Clip Studio Paint Pro. I did not have much of a plan to draw anything at that point. I simply wanted to see what this program has to offer, what the brushes and tools looked like, and how they behave. I stumbled upon the Gouache brush and immediately fell in love with the soft, feathery texture it gave, as it reminded me of the Wings drawing I did a while back using dark, textured paper and white watercolor pencil. This is where it struck me that I might be able to create something similar digitally and I got excited about it.

Because Wings were created with nothing else, but a single white pencil, I used the same approach to Jellies letting the background layer shine through in places creating depth, shape, or shadows.

But how did I arrive at jellyfish as my subjects? Well, since I was testing the brush on a dark background, I picked bright colors that popped in the almost neon-like matter. What strange things shine in the dark? All kinds of luminous, fluorescent critters in the sea, such as plankton, and even jellies of course!

Something that I learned that helped me a lot to get the effect that I wanted was drawing within the actual size, not zoomed in or zoomed out. Zooming in helps with tiny details while zooming out helps with overall composition and placement. While actual size assures that the line thickness or layers look clean and how you want them to be. That probably is something silly to note, but maybe for some, who also like me don’t have the biggest screens, both your pc and tablet, to work with, could help.

Softness was the main goal throughout the painting, even in the tentacles which I probably drew and redrew likely hundreds of times to make sure that the lines are soft, curvy, and flowy. I am super happy with what I managed to achieve with Jellies.

_{Screenshot from NFT Showroom}

And so I decided to tokenize them too! ^^ It was super easy to hook my Hive account to the NFT Showroom, to begin with. The site is super easy to work with and everything is pretty much straightforward, which makes me think that anyone stumbling upon it from outside the Hive world would be able to figure it out pretty quick as well. To tokenize your piece it costs only 5 HIVE (a fixed amount), which is a tiny amount in comparison to what I have heard people end up paying in other NFT platforms for failed transactions.

The only thing I felt was missing was the bidding system, but I read that it is in their roadmap for the future, so that is nice since putting a price on your work is extremely hard. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, right? Someone could be sticking a pineapple to the canvas and call it art, while someone else would look at it and think hmm, is this a joke? With art people like what they like, and the other way round. Anything goes which is fine.

What’s next? I will keep working on finding my digital style of course and continue my journey of progression which is never-ending. But as I was looking through posts on my feed yesterday, I stumbled upon a fresh drawing contest from HiveGamingCommunity, which I find super cool as I have been gaming a bit more myself lately. So I will try and do that this week and hope I will be able to post it in time before submission time runs out.

Until then, thank you for reading and stopping by! ^^

_{P.S. if anyone has tips on how to make traditional pieces into NFTs too, I would appreciate them. Do I make them print-ready? Got to learn that too.}