Beginners’ guide to creating NFT art for free

With NFTs taking the crypto world by storm in recent weeks, you may be wondering how to create your own tokenised art or where to go to collect them

Yesterday, one of my friends asked me for help to send an NFT to his brother for his birthday.

My friend’s brother works in game design and the two of them had been talking about the exciting possibilities for creating in-game item NFTs — such as skins, weapons, items and banners — that could be used across games and platforms.Imagine for a second that you could show off your impressive collectible items to your friends and hold items that held value across games? Rather than starting all over again with each new game, as gamers do currently.

Being short on time, we decided to jump on the current bandwagon and tokenise a JPG file — specifically a picture of their family dog (a collectible that I feel will only grow in sentimental value for now, but who knows!)

My friend had never even used cryptocurrency before yesterday, showing the potential for NFTs to bring new adopters to the market so while the process is still fresh in my mind, let’s dive into how to create your first NFT token.

Here’s what you’ll need:

1. Meta Mask
2. Buy/send some ETH
3. Sign up to OpenSea
4. Create your NFT
5. Send it on the blockchain to validate it and it’s voila, your own NFT

MetaMask

First things first, you’ll need to download a MetaMask wallet.

Meta Mask is an online wallet that features advanced dApp integration, allowing users to make purchases across DeFi applications by using its Chrome extension.

You’ll need to jot down your passphrase on some paper for seed recovery and you’ll be good to go.

Buy/send some ETH

Sending NFTs makes use of the Ethereum blockchain, so although creating an immutable record of your image is free, you will need to pay Gas fees to send and validate the token.

Either send some ETH that you already own to your new MetaMask wallet or purchase some using the in-built Wyre platform.

Sign up to OpenSea

After some digging around and avoiding some of the more expensive options for NFT creation (one site we found was charging a monstrous $1,500) we found OpenSea.

OpenSea, the “largest NFT marketplace”, offers a free NFT token creation service — although the token will need to be validated on the blockchain to be transferable and “real”.

Create your NFT

When creating the NFT from a JPG file, you get to choose how much commission the creator will receive every time it’s transferred between users.

Users can also add information to the image, such as hyperlinks, how many copies to create and secret messages that only the owner of the NFT can access.

Send it on the blockchain

With a blockchain essentially being a record of transactions, it stands to reason that your NFT token will need to be transferred to validate its existence to the blockchain.

And that’s it! Now you can create NFTs for joke-gifts to send to friends or create a masterpiece that someone is willing to pay millions for. I leave the choice entirely in your hands.