If you’ve been an avid follower of the crypto community for the past year, you must be aware of the hype surrounding the concept of NFTs. Since they operate on a different set of rules as compared to the standard cryptocurrency tokens, NFTs have developed a unique and paralleled importance in the overall crypto market.
For this reason, more and more people are flocking towards acquiring, creating, and generating new ideas within the NFT workspace to ensure that they do not miss the hype train of NFT art. If you wish to be part of the hype train too, you need to stick with us through the end of the article to make sure you have the required information for stepping into the diverse yet slowly-saturating market of NFT art.
Before we dive deep into the realms of how to convert an image to NFT and how to create unique NFTs, let’s take a quick look at the concept of NFTs and what kind of file formats qualify as an NFT.
Read also: How to Promote Your NFT on OpenSea
What is an NFT?
Blockchain has been the hottest buzzword in the business industry in the past couple of years. Since various business models are successfully integrating blockchain systems within their conventional business models, the importance of blockchain is only increasing with time.
Non-Fungible Tokens (or NFTs) are an enthusiastic implementation of blockchain systems that allow users to hold designated Ethereum blockchain addresses. The “non-fungible” in NFTs make them unique in nature, differentiating them from the general concept of a cryptocurrency that is fungible and can have multiple copies.
Types of File Formats That Qualify as NFTs
NFTs can be anything digital. From drawings to music, videos to normal GIF animations, you can literally market anything as an NFT as long as it has a public demand. This is why NFTs have the kind of importance they have in the market today. However, the most common and widely known file format that qualifies as NFTs and is easy to work on is the JPEG or PNG format for images. To learn more about starting your career in NFT generation, let’s dive deep into how you can generate image-based NFTs or convert your existing jpeg to NFT.
Can a Photo of a Painting be an NFT?
Converting a painting into an NFT might sound like a funny idea, but the world is moving towards the adaptation of NFTs as paintings. For this reason, if you wish to convert your painting into an NFT, all you need to do is create a digital copy of your painting by clicking a photo. However, you need to take care of a teeny-tiny detail. Since you’re converting your painting into an NFT and NFTs need to be unique for true fundamental value, you need to destroy the traces of the original painting to ensure that your NFT becomes the original painting. So don’t worry about the complicated laws of art trades and make sure you convert your drawing to an NFT to generate more financial value.
Read also: What Software to Use for NFT Art? – 8 Best Free Apps
Can You Turn Physical Art into NFT?
Given the hype around the concept of NFT, the most obvious answer to this question that everybody wants to hear is, yes. However, it’s not as simple as that. The answer to this question is both a Yes and No.
The only process that will allow you to convert your physical art into an NFT is by taking a picture of it. So, in actuality, you eventually had to create a digital copy of your physical art. Now that it’s clear that you need to digitalize NFT physical art, let’s expand on why is there a need to convert your physical art piece into an NFT, and will it bring you any greater profit than the physical art piece or not?
Getting the Same Value
Many people often ask questions like, will we get the same value, if not more, for our artwork if we convert them into an NFT? The answer to this question is very simple. It purely depends on the buyer community. The artwork and quality that you provided to your offline customers and attracted traction may not be satisfactory for people online. This would result in an overall lower price of your NFT as opposed to your product’s physical value.
How to Sell Your Physical Art While Maintaining a Unique Value?
In the field of art, value is directly proportional to the verification of the rarity of an art piece. The greater the uniqueness of your NFT, the higher is your chance to flip it for exponential amounts. However, if you feel you’re ready to make some dough and can increase the value of your NFTs, let’s go through some of the most common practices.
Tokenize Your Artwork and Destroy the Original Art Piece
Artists might hate to hear this but since NFTs need to be unique, you need to destroy the original piece and tokenize your art.
Install a Custom-Programmed NFC Chip to Your Physical Item
With the help of a unique, secure link to a JSON file that can store a tokenized record of your NFT, you can easily convert your physical product into a physical NFT without having to destroy and create a digital copy of it. Instead of you having to digitalize NFT physical art, you converted your existing physical art into a physical NFT, just like that.
How to Create a Physical NFT?
At first before you upload your art to an NFT marketplace, you need to digitize your artwork by either clicking a photo of your existing art piece or by installing a mechanism as discussed above.
Since you’re forced to digitize your artwork to convert them into an NFT and make them traceable, the digitized products can then be printed on dedicated frames that can portray the piece of art too. This makes the NFTs super unique and provides the extra value that was required for the collectors to hold onto an NFT as compared to a painting.
Read also: NFT Terminology to Get Social
How to Create NFT for free?
The process of creating free NFTs is heavily dependent on what type of art do you prefer. What file format do you wish to use and then choose the platform that allows free mining of NFTs. Since NFTs can literally be anything with an artsy appeal (in a digital format), the potential is limitless and the playing field is boundless for creators as enthusiastic as yourself.
For this reason, you first need to figure out the process of creating your desired NFT product by choosing a media format. When you’ve decided on the final format, you need to start your research on the platform where you wish to sell your NFTs for free.
Since the primary goal for the majority of NFT creators is to create content that can be monetized and sold in the global crypto art market. To achieve this mission, you are required to decide on a marketplace of your liking that has the most feasible rules for selling jpeg or distributing rights for your music as NFTs and can be the most profitable in terms of cost analysis.
There are several NFT marketplaces with varying fee structures to cater to the creators’ needs. Some of the most common marketplaces are as follows:
- OpenSea,
- Rarible.
Although Foundation can be considered as one of the most sophisticated NFT marketplaces due to the limitations of the platform and quality of work, if you wish to create NFTs for free then you need to explore OpenSea and Rarible.
OpenSea
Assuming that you have chosen your desired format that needs to be uploaded on the marketplace, here’s a list of steps that will help you become a creator and start your journey on OpenSea.
OpenSea allows uploading both an individual or an entire NFT collection. According to most OpenSea creators, making a collection is the most profitable approach. Setup the page for your collection and upload the items with apt depiction through their product images. Make sure that you choose Polygon blockchain as your default blockchain to ensure you can mint NFTs for free.
Rarible
Raible is the second-most widely used NFT marketplace that allows you to mint NFTs for free. You only need to go to rarible.com and connect your wallet. The easy-to-handle user interface of the website will help you create the NFT page as usual. After setting up the page, all you need to do is find the “free minting” option, choose the option to create your item which will take you to a page where you can sign free authorizations with your wallet, and voila!
The transformation of your jpeg to NFT or when you upload art to NFT marketplaces that already has a physical existence, you have a clear purpose of generating more value out of the product and are unhappy with the value being provided from the physical art piece. This is why the conversion of a painting into an NFT, or selling jpeg as NFTs provides you with a unique sense of relief. You only need to make sure what kind of image you want to portray to your collectors.
