What’s up, Hive? It’s been a good day. I’ve vented over the last few posts about the NFT space. I see so many artists complaining about gas fees on ETH and it makes me crazy. It’s similar to how I feel about my model and photographer friends having their Instagram accounts deleted or suspended for provocative photos. “I hate this platform”, but they still use it and rely on it. Fuck that! At @eos.detroit, we work predominantly with WAX, but I’ve had this gnawing need to do what I can to bringing some more collectors and artists to @NFTShowroom.

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I’ve been establishing my credibility these last six months. With the coloring brilliance of @swarddraws, we’ve been turning out the best art of our lives for Topps with Garbage Pail Kids and Alien. I’ve done collaborations with WAX, KOGS, Dark Country, Telos and several comic style campaigns for various EOSIO networks. With that momentum, I thought making the time to mint some Hive-centric, and Hive-exclusive NFT’s would be a good way to spin up the NFT enthusiasm here on our blockchain.

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I had an idea to do a collection of five different concept art/monsters, each based on the various roles within a bee colony. I started with the Guard. Really, just a sketch, but as I started inking this, it really came alive. Like anything, the more you do it, the better you get, and in the last few months I feel I’ve really made breakthroughs with my composition and approach to inking. This one of the Guard in one of my favorite inked pieces I’ve ever done. Total portfolio piece, and I was thrilled to mint it.

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I tokenized 50 of these, relative to the actual volume of guards in a typical hive colony. I’ll be doing that with all of them. Some being more scarce, and some being as common as an airdrop, more or less. This afternoon, I minted a one of one of a colored variant of the Hive Guard and within 15 minutes of it hitting the blockchain, @jongolson snapped it up for 500 HIVE! Please don’t misunderstand me; I’m happy to make money, but this exercise and use of my time is to bolster and grow the NFT space on @NFTShowroom and Hive.

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@jongolson seemed ridiculously happy to buy this limited edition, even saying he sold ETH to get it. That is 100% the goal here. I want to make my very best art, and make it only available on Hive. If you draw it, they will come. I loved drawing this thing, and I’m proud of how it turned out. I think @jongolson is happy with his purchase and I know he’ll be even happier in the investment when the other four pieces in the collection drop. That’s how we grow things here, people. Teamwork makes the dream work.

I’ll be sharing more of the concept behind this collection as well as potential times the art is going to drop on @NFTShowroom. I will tell you, the plan is now to do a Drone, Cleaner, Nurse, Undertaker and of course, the Queen […I’m already warmed up from the Alien collection I just finished]. Really excited about these developments. I’ve always been the kind of person that knew I had to be the change if I wanted to see the change, and I hope this is the beginning of artists expecting to get paid reasonably for their tokenized art on Hive, and collectors to come here to find the next big investment.