Creating an NFT collection on Opensea

Over the weekend I created my first NFT collection on Opensea. I don’t think I’ll have much success, but I learn by doing. If things go well I will definitely put more effort into this as a possible income source. Here’s a low-res sample

If you’re curious like me about NFT’s, here are some thoughts that stand out from my experience.

Firstly you’ll need a Crypto wallet like Metamask. It’s not hard to setup up but take a little time to get your head around how it works.

Secondly be aware you can add items to either the Ethereum or Polygon Blockchains. Ethereum (ETH) seems to be better suited to lower volume, serious artists. If you go down this path you’ll have to pay gas fees upfront to get started but end users can pay more easily in standard ETH, thus giving a better platform for success. If you choose Polygon you can upload your collection for free and pay for gas later after sales. The catch is that end users must also figure out how to buy wrapped ETH (WETH) which isn’t that hard but it may put some less tech-savy users off. I went for Polygon.

Take some time to view other users collection and note the use of properties. NFT’s are more valuable if there is a story and you can show rareability in the properties. AI art lends it’s self well to this as you can generate similar images with varying properties quite easily.

It takes quite a while to load the items and create the collections in Opensea. This collection took a few hours to just upload. I’d say they purposely don’t give you many tools to make it easy as this discourages bots and spammers from uploading heaps of rubbish media.

Anyway here is my first collection I called Gold Dark Beauty. The stable diffusion model I used contained images of my partner and she is the subject (with her permission of course!). This makes the images even more rare and I thought gold would be valuable ;-) . I liked the way the AI interpreted the prompt which was mostly “gold statue of [subject name] thinking, elaborate black lace masquerade with feathers, gold metal face, dark beauty ,low lit studio lighting, hyper realistic”.