How I Created my First NFT Collection with Free Tools

Even if it wins the contest for the ugliest NFT in the world 🙂

A few months ago I first heard about NFTs. At first I thought it was just some nonsense and ignored it. Then recently, I started to delve a little more into NFTs and was able to get my first peek behind the curtain. Now, I understand that NFTs are more than just weird images attached to a blockchain.

New NFT Applications

There are many new applications for users and companies that were previously not possible. For example, koji already offers several apps with exclusive features for NFTs:

• NFT Locked Giveaways
• NFT Message Wall
• NFT Storefront
• NFT Gallery 2.0
• NFT Locked Images
• NFT Locked Audio
• NFT Locked Videos
• NFT Locked Files
• NFT Premium Inbox
• NFT Secret Message
• NFT Locked Ebooks

An this is just the beginning!

NFTs have come to stay, and we have the opportunity to learn a lot. And I think it will be lot´s of fun too.

To get my hands dirty, I created my first NFT collection “Phoneheads”. I wanted to learn the NFT thing by making one myself. My Phoneheads collection is not minted yet, because there are some legal and tax questions – at least in Austria and the EU – that I need to have answered before I mint. But this shall not stop me, and so I simply publish the images and my personal experiences.

How to Make the Artwork

To get your unique NFT collection, you need to create the design/artwork first. I love to create things, but I´m not an artist. So I decided to start with a style, that seems easy for me – pixel art drawing. The technique is not so difficult, at least on a basic level. I´m sure pixel art pros reach much better results than me, but that´s OK. So, I looked around for a nice drawing tool and found Pixilart, which is free to use.

Pixilart

Free pixel drawing tool Pixilart

If you are new to graphic design – like me – you have to learn to think in layers. Each trait of your character – i.e. eyes, mouth etc. – needs to be on a separate layer. This enables another software – which I show you next – to mix all the variations together and to build thousands of unique NFT images. After you finished the design, you download your files from Pixilart as PNG. Make sure to export all layers.

How to Create Your Collection with Thousands of Images with Metadata

The next step is to create the whole collection with 10,000 NFTs or more or less. The amount is up to you. Building thousands of unique images by hand would take you weeks or months or even longer. But don´t worry, there are great software tools.

Mintables

This is a great new project! Sign up to get your free account at Mintables. Then upload your PNG files with your artwork. You need to build the file structure the same as the layer structure. i.e. background, body, eyes, nose etc. Then upload your files into each category (trait). Here is a great video from the founder of Mintables – Chris Zhu.

Now you have your collection with images and metadata. The next step is to mint NFTs.

How to Mint your NFTs

I´m sure there are many more ways, but I looked into two options to mint NFTs. Minting means creating the blockchain for the artwork.

You can do the minting with Mintables too. Just follow the instructions there. If you go with Mintables and use Polygon, your NFTs will also show up on Opensea or any other platform, that uses Polygon, but you avoid their platform fees.

Or you can upload your NFT collection to a platform like Opensea. Sounds easy first hand, but there is a problem. Opensea doesn´t offer a bulk upload tool. If you have 10,000 NFTs, it would take you days or weeks to upload each and every single file. Some nice programmers created a free tool to accomplish this task. Check out this video with all further Infos:

So, here are the steps to create your own NFT collection with free tools!

Leave a comment to share your experience!