How to Find Legit NFT Artists & Work With Them Effectively

Today we're going to talk about how to hire and find NFT artists to have a successful project. So my name is Eric Siu, and I own a portfolio of different businesses. And I'm here to help level up the world. So let's get to it. NFT project, let's say you're looking to build one, you're looking to launch one, you see all these people out there doing something great. And they're building community with like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, or maybe VeeFriends, and you want to do the same, right? So a or maybe you want to make a lot of money, which I don't think is the best reason, but maybe you want to do that. I'm going to talk about how I have gone about finding or sourcing different artists and how I've gone about working with them as well, and then how you can basically do the same. The first tool is Dribbble. So Dribbble is a marketplace where you can search for different artists, and Behance would be another one. With Dribbble, because I can search for certain keywords, I can go find different artists, right? So let's say I wanted to create an NFT about different warriors. So I might just type in the word warrior over here, and I can see the different warriors. Okay, so I can see what aesthetic am I going for over here. Am I going for more of like an anime type of aesthetic, or, you know, kind of cartoony like these? Or what else we got? I mean, this one's like a different style as well. This one's kind of traditional. This goes back to the Roman Empire, right? So you got to— you kind of get what I'm talking about. And then this goes back to the Roman Empire as well. So it really goes into what type of aesthetic that you're looking for. And so what I would do here, let's say I want to work with this guy over here, I can click on him and see what else he's got here. So he's got pretty interesting art and these could potentially fit as PFPs or profile pictures. So at this point I can go ahead and go to the about section over here and then I can find out how to reach out to him. So I might hit him up on Instagram, Instagram, and then also his email over here. So he's got his email over here and his Instagram. I'll hit him up. What I like to do is I like to reach out to maybe probably 10 or 15 different artists. Dribbble is just one way of doing it, right? And I would say a lot of these artists, they're looking to make money. You'll probably be able to get like a good price from a lot of these different artists out there, 'cause we're still in the very beginning of this new kind of the new dawn of creators, right? Or for creators. And so Dribbble is a good way to do it. Behance is another one. What I would say too is looking for the artists of different communities that have already done NFTs. So this is a screenshot of The Sevens. So that's an NFT project where I bought a couple and they were kind of more anime-like. And I like anime because I watch anime. This guy over here, if I go into the Discord, they actually have a channel that shows the team. When I look at the team, it actually shows the artist first, you know, front and center. So I can, I can just hit this artist up. I can message this artist in Discord if I want, assuming they haven't blocked their messages from strangers. Or I can just hopefully find this person on Twitter and see if they're— if they have their direct messages open. It could be as easy for you to look at the the top NFT projects that you like and see if you can contact the artist and see if they're available for work. Problem with that is if it's a very popular project, they're probably not available. And what I'd also do too is take a look at Twitter because a lot of people are hanging out on Twitter talking about this stuff. So just search for NFT artists. That could be one way of doing it. And a lot of people have it in their profile. So I just search NFT artists, see what we get. You know, look at the comments too. Chances are if you— if this person put NFT artists in their profile and you like what they put together, You might be able to just hit them up and say, hey, like, look, did you do that? Like, I would like something similar. And I'm assuming this is this person's art over here, right? That seems like an easy way to get in. The community seems like a good way to get in as well. Dribbble, Behance are other alternatives. So that's basically 4 right there. So I've shown you 4 different ways of kind of finding artists, and then you're going to have to negotiate and kind of negotiate with them on the price. Here's the thing. If you tell them you're going for volume and you're looking to develop maybe 40 or 50 different characters, then you can maybe get some discount, right? Say, hey, look, I'm looking to do maybe 40 or 60 characters or so, or maybe 100. And kind of go from there. Is that cool? This was kind of the early days of our NFT project called Leveling Up Heroes, which I haven't fully revealed here on YouTube yet. I will. And let me know in the comment if you'd like to hear more about it. This is one of our characters. This is the Wanderer. And you can see we had to go through 8 different, you know, initial sketches. And I actually ended up picking the one over here. And so then I started giving some, some background around this character. You know, we'll talk about the kind of the promotion aspect later because we're still kind of in the midst of that. You can see, I mean, this is from like an email chain. This is a In the very early days, this is what's gonna happen. The artist is gonna send you some sketches, and then you're gonna give some feedback, and they're gonna send you more sketches and more feedback, and then you kind of just go back and forth, right? But it's really important for you to, if you want to work well with these artists, that you're very communicative and you're staying on top of things, right? Otherwise, they're just gonna, you know, put together whatever you want. So really, if you're gonna do this thing, you kind of have to go all in on it. This is the kind of completed version of the Wanderer over here. And, you know, I'm very specific. I was like, oh, it should have a staff, right? And it should have a weapon that it's holding. This one should be more of like a guy. And we should also have like a woman character as well, like a female character. So this is the female over here, right? Longer hair, kind of, you know, different colored eyes, you know, different staff over here, different robe. So what we're trying to do with ours is we're trying to make for each character, we actually have 2 genders for it. You know, we're going to be creating 40 different characters. And then that means 80 different ones because of the you know, 2 genders, you know, we're gonna have different rarity levels as well. I haven't talked about character development and all that, but it's also important for you, the reason I'm telling you this right now too is it's important for you to talk about the character development with the artist too, so they kinda know where you're going with this and you can get them excited about the project so you can keep them engaged. It's the same thing with talking about hiring community people as well, or hiring anybody to help you with this, 'cause what's going on right now is you don't really have a ton of people, this space is so new that you don't have a lot of people actively looking for full-time work. You're gonna have a lot of freelancers, a lot of contractors out there that are, that are helping you, you're gonna have to work with them. And in order to continue to work with them, contractors are typically mercenaries. They're not really that incentivized to work hard for you. But if you can get them excited, and if you can even compensate them somehow, then you're going to be doing better than I believe 99% of other NFT projects out there, where it's just, they're just focused on a money grab. So we're very focused on the long term with how we're doing leveling up heroes. So, you know, finding the artist is just one piece of it, but actively You know, you got to negotiate. You got to get them excited about the project. You have to, you know, work with them closely and, you know, slowly, you know, you're going to start to be able to promote this stuff. Right. And we'll talk about that in another video. But let me know what you think I missed in the comments below. Let me know what else you'd like to hear around NFTs. And don't forget to hit the subscribe and the bell button if you'd like to see more videos like this. And don't forget to hit the like button as well. Like, like this video so we can get more people, get more views for this video. All right. So that is it for this video. And don't forget to check out these other ones over here and we'll see you in the next one.