San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Tattoo artists look to cash in on NFTs
Market for the digital artwork continues to grow
As a teenager, Richard “B.I.G.” Lopez Jr., spray-painted buildings, freeway underpasses and four-story billboards across San Antonio. Nearly two decades later, the 35-year-old tattoo artist is feeling the same kind of rush. But this time, it’s legal.
The owner of Pleasant
Dreams on the North Side spends most his time etching tattoos onto customers’ bodies. But in his spare time, he creates and sells digital artwork as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Investors can buy, sell and trade his NFTs like cryptocurrency — or any other valuable commodity, such as prized baseball cards or paintings.
NFTs are images and audio and video files that have been authenticated by blockchain, a digital ledger that records transactions on countless computers across the internet. An NFT is created by unique computer codes recorded on blockchain. They exist in a digital wallet belonging to the owner.
In San Antonio, many tattoo artists already make and sell paintings and stickers to generate extra income. And now they’re embracing NFTs. Once purchased, buyers can decide whether they want to replicate the digital images as tattoos.
“I always wanted to get to the highest place in the city to graffiti so everyone can see it,” says Lopez, who uses a lot of black and grays, thick lines and saturated colors in his tattoo work. “NFTs are the same way. You do some bad-ass (expletive), and you put it up. It’s a risk, but without risk there’s no progression.”
With star tattooists — such as Scott Campbell and Mark Machado (aka Mr. Cartoon), both based in Los Angeles — cashing in on NFT sales, Lopez is one of the first tattoo artists here to start selling his work to crypto investors.
Artists of all kinds are drawn to NFTs as a way to sell their work and advertise themselves.
“It’s a worldwide craze,” says Murtuza Jadliwala, an associate professor who teaches an undergraduate class on cryptocurrency and blockchains at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
NFT sales exploded last year, surging to $24.9 billion from $94.9 million in 2020, according to market tracker DappRadar. Most NFTs sell for between $100 and $1,000. But a small number of artists are already making big money off their NFTs. Michael Joseph Winkelmann, a Wisconsin-based digital artist who calls himself Beeple, sold an art piece for a record $69.3 million at Christie’s Auction Company in the U.K. last March.
Is this the real thing?
An age-old problem is the traditional art world is proving that a work isn’t a knockoff of the original. The digital art market has the same challenge.
“What blockchain solves is it associates an owner with a file,”
Jadliwala says. “In the physical world, there can be copies of the Mona Lisa, but there can only be one made by Leonardo da Vinci. NFTs are trying to create something similar in the digital sense.”
Still, copycats and scammers have been infiltrating OpenSea and Rarible, online NFT marketplaces that operate largely outside the reach of banks or governments.
OpenSea, the largest online NFT marketplace in the world, has been under fire for allowing people to create, or “mint,” NFTs for free and loosening its review process, which is intended in part to weed out fakes. Last month, OpenSea said on Twitter it found that more than 80 percent of the NFTs created with its free tool are “plagiarized works, fake collections and spam.” It has since limited people to minting up to five collections with 50 items each for free.
Uptake
In a largely cash-driven industry, some San Antonio tattoo artists remain in the dark on how NFTs work. Others are hesitant to invest in something they consider a fad. But Lopez and others are sold on NTFs.
Inside Pleasant Dreams, Lopez’s brick-walled studio, he wears a black “Go Big or Go Home” T-shirt, and his desk is a shrine of ink bottles and NBA and Apple stickers. Eminem and 50 Cent raps, heavy on the bass, blast out of his speakers. He reaches for his iPad to show a visitor the NFTs he’s made on Adobe Photoshop and Sketchbook, including one titled, “Eye Will Remain,” which features an animated alien and the sound effects of rainfall.
By January, Lopez had created a digital wallet and accounts on OpenSea and Rarible, which charges a 2.5 percent fee on every sale. He created his NFTs as single editions, uploaded digital files of the works and started selling them for $150 to $350 in Ether cryptocurrency.
So far, he’s made $3,000 from sales, and expects 5 percent to 10 percent royalty every time one is resold.
“Selling NFTs is a way for artists to be artists and not have barriers to selling their art,” he says. “The money spent equals exposure. Even if you don’t sell, people see your art.”
Lately, Lopez has been interested in creating NFT “projects,” multiple editions or a series centered on one character. The famed Bored Ape Yacht Club website did the same last year, making 10,000 variations of cartoon apes and selling them as digital assets stored on blockchain for $200 each in Ether.
Joining the scrum
Just inside Loop 410 in Northwest San Antonio, Brian Pittman free-hands a Freddy Krueger horror tattoo on a customer’s shoulder in Element Tattoo. He takes a break to show 433 versions of a pit bull he’s been designing on Pro Create software since Christmas weekend.
Pittman doesn’t have a digital wallet yet, but he plans to create one soon and upload an NFT project to an online marketplace.
“Man, as an artist, what else do you want?” he says. “I just want to be a part of it. I want people to have a little of what I do. I can build a name and advertise. I want to take care of my family with my art.”
Pittman, 44, grew up on a ranch neighboring the Branch Davidian compound near Waco and worked for awhile building communication towers. He became a tattoo artist more than two decades ago. Like most artists in San Antonio, he’s an independent contractor who works at an established studio, but he buys his own tattoo machine and ink. He gets paid hourly and works six days a week. His fingers are permanently curled from years of tattooing surrealist pieces on his customers.
Pittman says he’s not techsavvy and was late to open an account on Instagram, the social media site where most area tattooists display their artwork. In recent months, he’s been scanning the internet for cryptocurrency-and N FT- related news articles and YouTube instructional videos.
He doesn’t think selling his tattoo designs and paintings as NFTs will make him and his wife rich, but he wants to share his work with the public and to advertise himself to bring in more customers.
“I was slow and on the end of social media, but I don’t want to be one of the last people to get into NFTs,” he says. “If I look at NFTs as ‘I’m going to be a millionaire,’ it’ll just be heartache. I just know I’m going to work my ass off tattooing for the rest of my life and I figure I try.”
For now, Pittman is sitting on his artwork, adding different articles of clothing and looks to his pit bulls to fashion them into NFTs.
He’s not fazed by the possibility of somebody copying and selling his work.
“I’d advertise the scam if it ever happened to me,” he says. “More recognition.”
Some tattoos artists say they like the idea of selling their artwork on online marketplaces without government oversight — despite the potential for scams. But others would welcome regulatory watchdog, in part because of intellectual-property thieves and the overall volatility of the cryptocurrency market.
Taxes are another consideration. Government involvement in NFT sales would more clearly put buyers and sellers on the Internal Revenue Service’s radar.
“Lots of artists in the city work from home or in their shops and deal only in cash because they’re off the books,” said Arnold Sanchez Jr., a 39year-old tattoo artist working at Ink Couture, which operates three studios in San Antonio.
Pittman is among the few tattoo artists who would be OK with oversight of NFTs and cryptocurrencies. “I want to be on the books and legal as I can,” he says.
For Sanchez, the fewer regulations, the better.
Born in San Antonio, Sanchez worked as a Bexar County juvenile detention officer for a decade before becoming a tattoo artist seven years ago.
“I wanted to be my own boss and be with my kids,” he says. “Now I’m an independent contractor.”
He doesn’t currently accept cryptocurrency as payment for his tattoos, but he thinks most tattoo shops will accept digital money in the near future. He also believes NFTs are digital assets that are here to stay. He’s invested in Bitcoin and has been researching NFTs on the internet.
“It’s smart to invest in crypto and NFTs if you have the money. To ignore it would be a dumb move,” Sanchez says. “I see it growing. I have no choice. I need to change with the times, like getting new tattoo equipment, even though it goes against my beliefs and standards.”
Back at Pleasant Dreams, Lopez recalls getting arrested as a teenager for graffiti and serving a brief stint in juvenile detention. He fled San Antonio in violation of his probation and learned how to tattoo on the lam, drifting between Dallas, Chicago and Seattle. He returned home three years later to turn himself into the police and caught a break from a judge who slapped an ankle monitor on him instead of a prison sentence.
Lopez isn’t the outlaw he was then. He says he doesn’t have a problem with self-reporting NFT sales to the IRS. He sees his digital artwork sales as a legitimate business venture, bound to help him financially in the years to come.
“If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it,” he says. “The worst thing that’s going to happen is you lose a few bucks. But what if you don’t?”