Being A Sushi Artist: Interviews with the Birthday NFT Contest Winners

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Sushi

6 min readSep 22, 2021

Our first anniversary birthday contest was a roaring success: over 100 artists entered, treating our eyeballs to over 65 pieces of stunning Sushi-related artwork!

The top 3 winners of the Birthday NFT Contest are:

‘Be a Party Chad With Sushi’ by @mochiNFT

2. ‘Sushi Runner’ by @fEJKgg

3. ‘A Visit To The Moon’ by @NeronMinus (A.K.A. Thihathu)

Mark your calendars!

The winning piece by Mochi will be fractionalized and auctioned off on MISO (Miso.Sushi.com) as the official Sushi 1st Anniversary NFT early October, 2021. Keep an eye out on our Twitter for the exact date/time.

After picking our jaws off the floor, we thought it might be nice to sit down with the three artists our community deemed most worthy of recognition. Namely, @mochiNFT, @fEJKgg and @NeronMinus.

Could we start off by hearing a little bit about your artistic background, e.g. how you learned, what your style is, if this is a profession for you or simply a passion?

Mochi:
Yes, I learned this skill because I can’t remember a week without drawing and that makes me improve my skill and style everyday. I have a close to cartoon style but always using some highlights, it’s my favorite part of my work. 2 months ago I invested in the new iPad Pro, never had money to do something like that but Crypto Space is life-changing opportunity to all of us, and started using Polygon chain to upload a few NFTs, even there is a collection with 1/1 iPad NFT that represents the original purchase, that was an inflection point in my artistic career.

fEJK:
I picked up digital design around 15 years ago when I was 13 years old as a hobby to support my passion for creating content on YouTube. Being interested in this was quite a taboo interest at the time and didn’t have a lot of publicity around it. Despite this, I became very invested and improved my skills through self-teaching and experimenting with different software to create the ideas I had. If there was something I wanted to create and I didn’t understand how, I would research and study the methods to bring it to life.

I’ve been a freelance designer for the majority of my design career but have also worked within companies as a designer. I generally work with Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects and Cinema 4D but pride myself on having knowledge on a wide range of apps to complete my designs.

Thihathu:
I have completed training. But I mainly learn by watching videos on YouTube. I like the abstract style.

How did you first hear about Sushi?

Mochi:
Honestly, to crypto the life-changing money opportunity for those who love working and adding real value to the world. After that, the promise of similar freedom for everyone worldwide.

To the Sushi community ♥️ the first that attracted me to it were the discord memes and that I can use it in more chains that I know, which is very great for the crypto ecosystem.

fEJK:
I initially heard about Sushi just before it’s release through a let’s say ‘unknown’ figure but didn’t initially get involved as I personally had not entered the DeFi space just yet. I’ve not been around Sushi for too long even today, but from just over a month of being here everyone included in the project is extremely welcoming and helpful. Any questions I may have, be it design or technical, have been answered in great detail.

Thihathu:
Chef Nomi is still looking for trouble. My favorite part is that they [Sushi community] can work tirelessly!

What inspired you to create the piece you did for Sushi’s 1st Birthday?

Mochi:
Was a birthday so it need to be a party, if it’s a party I know which music should be playing, Pursuit of Happiness (Steve Aoki Remix) — Kid Cudi hahaha and one day before uploading my artwork my partner was participating in the $DOG fractionalization in MISO and showed me the Bassjackers In Doge we trust song and the party was ready! I really felt like I was in the party (indeed I’m at the table near the cake like IRL hahahaha)

fEJK:
I’ve been working behind the scenes on a few Sushi projects with I’m Software, Jiro, Tangle and Chester. I’ve created around 700 token icons, overlays, YouTube thumbnails, announcements and a few other projects still in the works. I saw the Art Contest as a good way to show a wide range of design-related skills to show what I’m capable of as I’m still quite fresh around here. I’ve enjoyed myself a lot and would like to one day call Sushi my home. I’m working hard to prove myself to the team and the community.

Thihathu:
Thanks to @0x_bella for guiding me to compete!

How have you found the transition from creating work outside of the crypto community to inside it?

Mochi:
It wasn’t easy because I didn’t finish my studies for having to look for a job young, but after saving a bit of money to invest with my partner we together moved to another country. I started learning English and Portuguese few weeks ago and the hardest part is to make me understand or having a conversation, but I know I’ll reach that goal haha

fEJK:
Contributing to projects on Sushi is my first experience creating work for the crypto space and so far it’s been a great time. A wide range of different projects to work on, an extremely cool Neo Tokyo art style and, it works well with my love for clean lines and minimalism.

Thihathu:
There is nothing strange about it!

Where can we find you and see more of your art?

Mochi:
In mochi.li my web portfolio, @mochiNFT on Twitter & Instagram and my Opensea profile you can find different artworks. So to see all my artwork you should visit all.

We are working too in a discord server for mochi.li as the best option to connect with my community, feel free to join in mochi.li/discord.

Last but not least I want to thanks all the people who voted, followed, shared and sent good vibes, community driven projects and Sushi.com for doing this kind of contests that help to empower artists and community members ✨

fEJK:
I currently don’t have a public portfolio in the DeFi space but I’ll work on putting one together. Chances are, if you follow Sushi’s socials, you’ve seen some of my work!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/fEJKgg

Thihathu:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NeronMinus?s=09

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Mochi’s winning piece will be fractionalized and auctioned off on MISO early October. Proceeds will be split between Mochi, the runner-up artists and xSUSHI holders.

Be there or be square!

Sushi is building a comprehensive DeFi ecosystem with AMM, leverage & margin trading platform, token launchpad and NFT artist platform. Follow our socials to keep up with our product launches and find out more on how you can make the most of your cryptocurrency assets with Sushi’s secure and powerful DeFi tools!