(aka Why a 42 year old man started drawing cute toads that have a boat for a mouth)
About the Artist
I don’t usually consider myself an artist. At least I didn’t.
I’ve been married 21 years already and have 4 great kids, ages 12–18. I am a full time homemaker, part-time missionary and part-time entrepreneur. I’ve actively traded crypto for 4 years so far. I am very fortunate that my endeavors allow me to spend a lot of time with my busy family and engage with so many incredible minds in the crypto/meta verse.
I am known for being creative with woodworking but have never been known as a traditional artist. I collect art from various artistic family members and from street artists in 3rd world countries where I work as a construction missionary. I entered the NFT marketplace more as an extension of my regular blockchain investing than because I valued art. But then I purchased my first NFT and everything changed.
As I began to interact with artists, development teams and the surrounding communities, I began to experience an awakening. Art started to look different. It took on meaning because of the artist that said “gm” to me on twitter, my understanding of what art actually is changed drastically. Is art the jpeg that I just bought or is it the challenge that I worked through in order to earn that jpeg from a quirky, but fun, and engaging artist? I think the answer is BOTH and creates both long term monetary value as well as real intrinsic value as a collector who has joined a community.
I also began to see how the utility of NFTs is beginning to fulfill some of the utility that I have long imagined for smart contracts. Memberships, multi-sig deals, fractionalizing investments, the AR/VR metaverse. The list can go on but it’s enough to say that I realize there is a great future and it includes NFTs and Web3 as a foundation.
All of this combined with having some artistic children, specifically my 15 year old daughter, made me start thinking about ways that I can get her, and others like her, involved in creating NFTs (sidenote — I asked her a to please create a piece of digital art for me for Christmas that I could mint as her first NFT). Is there a way to partner with schools to add this to art and tech curriculums? If so, who can teach them? Art and photography are one thing, but what about smart contract deployment and minting?
This was all top of my mind the day the ToadBoat idea was born.
ToadBoat Appears
October 23, 2021 I was chatting on Twitter with the @RealVisionBot about how I was having a failed attempt at engagement by attempting to give away a pixelated robot toad. A toadbot. RVBot mentioned that they would like to have a toadbot except miskeyed it as toadboat (see image below). As soon as I saw that an image popped into my mind of a toad with a wooden boat for a big wide mouth. Attempting to be funny, I sketched it out on my iPad with my finger and commented back with it saying that I should mint that toadboat and send it to him instead of the pixelated toadbot.
The Bot responded with a comment that may have changed my life forever:
“You never know what will happen in the future. Maybe you’ll be an NFT billionaire and I would’ve had the chance to own your first minted NFT”
I certainly don’t imagine myself as an NFT billionaire but suddenly I started exploring the idea of actually minting NFTs for myself and, for some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about ToadBoats.
The next day I drew another ToadBoat, the Sail ToadBoat, and dm’d it to the RV Bot to let him know he may have created something…
Since that first day I have drawn at least one new ToadBoat every day.
ToadBoats Launched
These silly toads wouldn’t leave my head so I decided to put them to work. These are the toads that will teach my children, and maybe yours, how to join Web3 at an age when it can feel like a native language.
ToadBoats is an experiment being used as a tool. The questions being asked are:
- Can I teach myself to create digital art (being good is another question)?
- Can I successfully deploy an ERC721 smart contract and mint NFTs that are not on the OpenSea shared contract? This is one of the most important parts to me so the artists can own the original provenance.
- Can I develop and manage a community of collectors and interested parties that align with the art or ideas behind it?
- If we can accomplish the first 3 goals, can we bring this to our youth?
Today (days before officially launching the first 9 ToadBoats) I am committed to completing a collection of hand drawn ToadBoats numbered 0–68 that will show my progress on question number 1. The world will have to decide my success.
I am very happy to say that it seems we have successfully deployed an ERC721 contract and have begun minting 1/1 hand drawn ToadBoats. Success!
If you are reading this then it means I am having at least partial success with the 3rd question about community. I am very grateful for all of those across this planet that have tuned in and encourage me daily. It is very humbling and makes me very bullish on my ability to partner with you all to accomplish number 4.
My daily drawing includes lots of things that may not be obvious to help me learn. I’m learning about color values, shading, layers and so many things that I can’t even explain. I’m experimenting with various boats and toad styles as well as with different creation techniques.
I’ve also been in many technical chats to see how hard it would be to deploy a contract. It’s a lot to take in and many have been patient with me while I ask questions.
ToadBoats Horizon
!Wen Roadmap?
If there is ever an official roadmap, it will be far far in the future. There are some hopes and dreams that I have for this adventure and few if any of them are tied to financial success. We need finances for success but success is not defined by finances.
If there is enough demand and support for this initial project then I will consider additional projects that require funding that I don’t currently have. As you get to know me you will see that I care more about changing the world than I do about wealth. If ToadBoats is successful there are 3 main things I would like to do that would continue to fund positive change.
- Charity — As a construction missionary and co-founder of a humanitarian non-profit, I dream of being able to partner with people to fund more projects and charities across the globe. I’d like to have a project where revenues support that in some way like a Charity DAO. I don’t know how it would work or if anyone would buy in, but these are my people……
- Education — I would love to find ways to fund a platform that schools can use as a sort of “typing tutor” to slowly walk students through different categories of skills that would enable them to launch NFTS. I imagine some coding, some art, some social media lessons, etc. If we had a platform, it could double as a place to onboard young artists into their first NFTs. It was also brilliantly suggested we work with families and help curate a space for NFTs created by youth. A single place to do all of that is ambitious and would require a lot of funding to build and a dedicated community to deploy.
- Investment — I want to use funds to buy NFTs from young artists. Our first piece will be a Nyla Hayes piece minted from TIME.com as their first collection from an Artist in Residence. I would love to create a museum supporting young NFT artists that would rival some of the biggest NFT collections in the world, but only from artists under 17. This could easily also be a DAO which would give us greater reach in both funding and in finding the right artists to support.
None of these are promises. They are hopes and dreams. If any of this makes you excited then you’re in the right place.
Welcome and GM!
