Rabbits and cyberpunk. Digital art by Denis Sapunov.
We continue our weekly interviews with the most interesting authors on our platform. This time our guest is a young and very promising artist and writer — Denis Sapunov. Today we will learn about how Denis got acquainted with the NFT industry, how the idea of cyberpunk rabbits came about and what plans he has for the future.
Greetings Denis! Tell us a little about yourself, how did you decide to become an artist?
Hello, I’m 23 years old and I’m an aspiring crypto artist. I used to be a rock musician, but my life changed after I got to know NFT and the art in general. I was covered with a wave of ideas, projects, writing stories, and creating art. Many interesting acquaintances appeared. In general, after the appearance of such a thing as NFT, my life began to change dramatically. At the moment I already have several projects, but the first and main one is of course Cyber_Rabbit.
Tell us how you learned about NFT technology? What NFT marketplaces have you worked with?
More than a year ago, I came across a rather interesting book by Timur Kazantsev “Blockchain Technology and NFT”, where I first got acquainted with crypto art and found out that it turns out that there are such platforms where people exchange, create collections, entire communities and all this can be done remotely. This inspired me a lot and I began to massively study information. I read books about art, watched videos on YouTube about NFTs, studied cryptocurrency, trading, and so on and so forth. The first and currently the main NFT marketplace for me was the Open Sea platform. My main Cyber_Rabbit collections were created and minted there. But this marketplace has a big problem, since the platform is closed for Russia and you can get there only through a VPN, and many people in the Russian Federation are too lazy to do this. Therefore, sales have dropped significantly and now the project is ready to expand to the RF platforms.
Now there is a lot of noise around neural networks like Midjourney, which are already quite capable of generating art comparable in quality to a human one. You probably already heard about the boycott on the largest digital art platform ArtStation? How do you look at this situation with neural networks?
To be honest, I don’t follow the protests that much, I simply don’t have extra time for hype and negativity. Of course, I heard about the boycott, but I don’t see anything wrong with neural networks. Why? I just use a neural network too. Yes, it is an excellent resource for developing imagination and for increasing the number of ideas. As for example, I make my NFTs, I work out the idea of what I need. Now I’ll tell you more. For example, will it be a separate NFT that will not be in the collection and its history is not similar to others, or will it be a collection of some settlement, city, country? Maybe it will be the leader? Or a poor character with his life’s difficulties? Then clothes, character and so on. After drawing up a plan, I start generating NFTs in the neural network. Sometimes it can take quite a long time, an hour, two or more, since the network rarely gives out exactly what I want to see. I select 10–30 arts, check, review and choose the only one. Then the processing begins, I process the art in Photoshop and finish the details on the tablet. And only after the art is ready, we move on to the most interesting process, writing the story itself. It may be short, or it may be quite long, so much so that now I am writing several mini-books for certain NFTs and these books will be available only to the owners of this or that art. The next stage I call the maturation stage. Art and history are stored for 3–5 days, and if after a while I still consider it worthy, then the art will become a full-fledged NFT. But it is important to consider that neural networks should only help artists, and not do all the work for them, believe me, if AI does everything for you, then these works have no meaning and soul.
Why rabbits?
Once in my life there was a turning point. My wife and I moved to another city with essentially nothing for our souls. At that time, I was working on one project, namely writing a script for my visual novel. It was closely related to Trap music and therefore I needed to study it in more detail. Listen more, read more, etc. Then I started writing my own tracks, which suited the game and my lifestyle. I thought about the name for a long time and it dawned on me, Trap music goes well with the CyberPunk style, but what else could I come up with? I won’t just call myself CyberPunk, right? After much thought and rebounding, the idea of the name Cyber_Rabbit came up in my head. And it sounds interesting and plus according to the horoscope I’m a rabbit, and who doesn’t love rabbits? I continued to write everything for probably half a year, but then changes again burst into my life and I was already carried to another city. Projects were frozen, as there was no free time from the word at all. And not so long ago, about 7–8 months ago, I came across my old track, and at that time I was already interested in NFT and tried myself in it. I kept thinking, what topic should I do NFT on? And then just BOOM, an explosion of ideas in my head and this flow could not be stopped. But what if we make rabbits in the style of CyberPunk, and even each will have some kind of story that will not just be a description, but part of this character, his soul? I thought about this topic for a long time and created my first collection of rabbits in the CyberPunk style. An interesting combination of animals and style of the future.
Tell me what inspires you?
I have two main muses for creativity, these are music and books. I like to read very much, especially books in the genre of detective, horror and fantasy, a lot can be emphasized for myself and pumps fantasy quite well. I always choose music according to the mood and the story I am writing. Sometimes even this does not help, because you need to catch the mood, but if you catch it, then your hands on the keyboard and the pencil on the tablet work wonders. So on a languid evening you read another book by Stephen King, then turn on pleasant music and go into battle.
I love being inspired by contemporary art. Of the artists, I would single out Banksy, Orkhal, Tetsuya Ishida, and of the crypto artists Stepan Khristoforov, Evgeny Zubkov, Eduard Mikhailov and many other truly capable masters of their craft. They create something from which you are delighted and amazed at how strong a person’s fantasy is. Sometimes you need to think hard and for a long time about the meaning of the work and its meaning, but after you understand it, the picture will be ready to tell you its story as your close friend.
How did you find out about Barter Smartplace?
At the beginning of my journey, as I said earlier, I was only familiar with the Open Sea. But bad luck, they no longer work with the Russian Federation and therefore sales are going very badly. While I was looking for a new platform for my NFTs that works in the Russian Federation, I was very lucky, a representative of Barter Smartplace wrote to me and offered favorable conditions for development. My stories, art and potential got Smartplace interested. We called and discussed the details. It turns out that Barter Smartplace is the first and currently the only marketplace that was created in the Russian Federation and operates on the territory of the country. This is a great chance for the development of me, my channel, as well as for many new acquaintances from the circle of collectors and artists.
What would you like to see on our site, how to make it more convenient?
Now I haven’t noticed any obvious deviations or bugs, but there is something to correct. I would add a description of the channel and a description of the artist himself. Who is he, what does he do, what are the plans for the development of the project, etc. This will warm up interest and reduce the number of scammers. It is also necessary to create collections, because many of us in childhood loved to collect and collect something. It is much more interesting when people collect NFT sets from collections of a certain genus. With such interest, this fuels interest in buying. Well, you also need collection covers, channel covers and the ability to put a GIF or a short video on your account avatar.
Tell us about your future creative plans
Our group has a lot of things planned for this year.
In short:
-There will be a lot more new art.
- Much more new stories and plots will be written.
-The storylines of the characters will begin to intersect, which will lead to separate stories that will be released as mini books.
-The graphics of the characters will be greatly improved.
-Characters will appear in 3D.
-Small (and maybe big) story games will appear.
-You will be able to make characters for yourself upon request.
-Merch will appear with our NFTs.
And to all this, 2 more new projects are added on other platforms, such as Rarible and Getgems. There will no longer be rabbits, but something else, until I spoil, all the information will appear in my group, so stay tuned.
What do you think an aspiring artist should pay attention to in the back of NFTs and neural networks? How to succeed in the new era?
First of all, realize that if you are an artist, then your work is made by the hands and brain of a person, and not a single machine can not put its soul into its work. Just realize that this is not at all bad, because you can also draw thoughts there. You don’t get mad at artists who do their work in the same style and on similar themes as you do, right? So there is no point in arguing with the neural network. People are stereotyped and it is difficult for them to get along with something new, with something that they have not met before. Get ideas, promote a topic that you put into your soul and made yourself. Develop and strive to live in peace and tranquility.
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