The 888 Inner Artist Initiative — October 2022 Update

October was another great month for the 888 Inner Artist Initiative. As discussed last month, we have already begun purchasing art from emerging artists. We also created a community just for them, while showcasing their art to a wider audience. This month, we continued with those efforts, while also building new ways that we can support artists.

One of these “new ways” comes in the form of a very special partnership.

IAI x Sparkles

Flare is one of our Realm Guardians, and as such, we have many great artists who produce their art on the Flare Blockchain. However, these artists have not been able to submit their art for our weekly event … until now.

Today, we are pleased to announce that the Inner Artist Initiative is going multi-chain! For our weekly celebration of art, we are partnering with our friends at SparklesNFT to now consider pieces (priced at 1 ETH or less in SGB) that are sold on Sparkles, the leading NFT marketplace on the Flare network.

Sparkles, as a Champion of our White Realm, has been both a wonderful partner to us and a strong supporter of artists. They are a grassroots business, with their entire team being born out of the Flare community. They have created an effective and accessible platform to allow creators on Flare/Songbird to safely buy and sell NFTs. Their philosophy is to push boundaries, create and maintain standards, be creative, and make everything they do fun and interactive for their community, which is also, especially now, our community.

We invite the artists on Sparkles to apply to become a Verified Inner Artist. For the question, “How did you hear about 888 Inner Artist?” please feel free to enter “Sparkles” as your referral. Please also make sure that you are in our Server as a community member, so that if we verify you as a Verified Inner Artist, we can give you the role.

For those artists in our Server who would like to learn more about what Sparkles offers, you can check out their Twitter and join their Discord.

Our weekly event is a weekly celebration of art, and our partnership with Sparkles enhances that celebration by expanding opportunities for artists. We can’t wait to see all the great, new art that’s coming.

Purchased Art and Spotlight Artists

In the meantime, here are the wonderful pieces that we purchased this month.

Week 6

Spiritual Butterfly by Montreal.AI

Week 7

Andy is Back! by Cryptochile.eth

Week 8

One big Hoax for man, one Giant leap for USA by LorenHandArt

Week 9

Dog On The Beach by Cristóbal Riesco

In addition to purchasing this art, we also offered the artists of these pieces an AMA in our artist spotlight channel. We’ve had some amazing conversations with these talented artists, and these AMAs with our spotlight artists have become an excellent way for our community and our artists to get to know each other better.

Asking Artists

In addition to the AMAs we do in the artist spotlight channel, we also introduced a new segment to that channel, which we call, “Asking Artists.”

The basic idea of this segment is that we will gather art-related questions from our Verified Inner Artists within our artist-gated private chat channel, and then we will crowdsource answers from those artists in the public-facing artist spotlight channel. For each session, we plan to feature one of the questions asked by the artists and then give those artists the opportunity to answer the question in an open-ended roundtable discussion format.

Some sample questions may include: “How do traditional artists go about digitizing work they’ve done on a canvas or other traditional medium and turn it into an NFT? What tools are needed? Any tips in terms of making sure the transfer is clean?” or “If I want to expand my artistic horizons and get into X (painting, digital art, 3D art, photography as art, etc …), what software/resources do I need and how do I get started?”

This will be our first foray into art education, while also giving a platform for more of our artists to engage with each other and the community at large. As we’ve said in the past, the 888 Inner Artist Initiative will be built in partnership with artists, based on their input. This new segment will allow us to hear directly from the artists.

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As a reminder, the 888 Inner Artist Initiative is not just a single program. Rather, it is a comprehensive and ever-increasing set of efforts and endeavors designed to celebrate, empower, and support artists. Our goal is to meet the various needs of various artists, in a wide variety of ways, wherever they may be on their artistic journey.

For more information, please join our Discord server, follow our Twitter, and view our Medium. Also, as a reminder, if you are an artist, we encourage you to apply to become a Verified Inner Artist. No token purchase is necessary, but you will need to join our Server and be verified as a community member in order to receive the role.