Blake Jamieson, a pop portrait culture NFT artist for professional athletes is currently making over $800K just from selling NFT’s. It all started with selling prints on the NFT platform and at one time, he sold over $46K worth of his artworks in NFT weeks. From that day, his life changed and the numbers kept growing from $100k to now over $800k. As he says “I think NFT’s are going to change the entire landscape of art”.
As for him, it has definitely changed his life.
Artistic Life of Blake Jamieson
Blake Jamieson grew up in a very creative household, his dad was an art collector and also a photographer. His mother makes mosaics and his grandmother paints. Surprisingly, he actually studied economics in college and got into Digital Marketing after college. According to Blake, Digital Marketing was very cool for him as it allowed him to do something artistic like graphic design and video editing.
However, when he turned 30, he realized that he wanted to do something else. Even though he was doing some creative things everyday, he wasn’t really serious about it. After which he left the job and took a five week trip to Barcelona without having any plans as he was not familiar with Europe and never had visited the place.
Barcelona as we know was the Graffiti Capital of the world in the 1980’s and we could see artists from all over the world visiting Barcelona to just paint on the walls. During his trip, Blake really got inspired by art and just the culture of art and design. He came back to the United States and decided that art was going to become very close to him.
He then setup a studio in his own family home, just north of San Fransisco. He actually used some of his Grandmothers studio equipment’s.
His Digital Marketing Experience became a huge plus point in his life as it allowed him to build a following for himself and his artworks.
As he says” Naturally, I documented everything I did, took pictures of everything, posted it online and slowly people started saying, hey how much is that piece, oh i wanna buy this piece, I am interested. “
Although, for six months, he did not sell any paintings because he wasn’t comfortable with his ability with paint brush.
But he was still business minded and he wanted to sell paintings therefore, he started to make a list of all the people who were interested in his paintings and reached out to them.
After which, around 2016, he made a Facebook post that was about a recap of the year and it displayed all the paintings that he had painted for the year. He also mentioned in the post that he was ready to sell his first piece. In fact, he was ready to sell 10 pieces, and he would paint whatever his customers wished for for $500 dollars USD. Surprisingly, those 10 pieces sold within a couple of hours and made his first $5000 dollars selling art.
From here, he got the confidence in his work and skill and it became the “Ah haa” moment for him. It gave him the determination to go even further and make real good money from art.
Further Growth in his Art Career
He then started analyzing his customers and the art industry in general as he realized that he needed to know who is his customers and what problem is he solving.
After looking at the list of all his buyers, he found out that most of his buyers were from tech startups. He realized the fact that “Maybe he is the kind of guy that makes super dope art for offices”.
One of the art work he made was “Steve Jobs Portrait” for Hint Water in San Francisco.
He then started looking for ways to market himself differently from the rest of the artists. As he realized that most of the artists were on Instagram, he started using the social media platform, Linkedin.
Things then started to catapult and he was now in Las Vegas, meeting athletes and people like Jarred Fayson who played in the NFL and according to Blake, he changed his life completely.
Fayson, really liked his artworks, and he wanted Blake to get into football. He recommend Blake to other celebrity athletes in the football industry. He helped Blake get more clients, promoted his art and that really got Blake doing some serious work for celebrity athletes.
HOW HE GOT INTO THE NFT HYPE?
From here he went from “I made art for offices” to “I make art for athletes”. He would get Direct messages from team players asking him about how they could get one of his artworks.
Ultimately, he was seen and noticed by TOPPS Baseball Cards and they invited him to be a part of the Topps Project 2020 where they selected top 20 artists from all over the world and the artists were assigned to recreate 20 different iconic baseball cards which were all exclusively sold on the Topps Baseball card website for $20 Dollars.
During the Topps project, one of his friend named Matt Costello stared a Podcast with him. One of the early guests was an artist named Michael Johnson was a former Major League Baseball player and he was the guy who introduced Blake to NFT’s or Non-Fungible-Tokens.
At first he didn’t really understand it and he did actually post an artwork on one of the NFT platforms however, nobody actually bid on it and saw it. While, at this time, he wasn’t even promoting his artworks as he was pretty confused about NFT’s.
During that time, one of the collectors actually bid on his NFT artworks and the bid was around 0.1 $ETH which is approximately $100 to $150 USD. He was pretty surprised by the bid so he started to think creatively about how he can make the product experience better. As he realized the collectors were getting something that cannot be touched, and it was completely digital.
He started experimenting with Canvases and he wanted to also deliver a physical print of the artwork along with the Digital Version of it as NFT’s.
Soon, he started experimenting with different artworks that he made. One of them was basically a piece of art which he converted into different sections by taking high resolution pictures of each section of the artwork and sold each section for $1000 to $1200 dollars.
Within a few months, he was able to sell his NFT Artworks and make over $40,000 – $46,000 on Super Rare NFT platform and around $5000 dollars USD on OpenSea.com.
Full Story Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDAZZfGRBeE&t=301s
