Focalism by OUTERGROUND - Nft's on opensea.io

Opensea is the crypto marketplace for collectibles, digital art and more including Land ID's from the metaverse.

https://opensea.io/collection/focalism

OUTERGROUND's 3rd collection Focalism for opensea consists of a series of 12 original digital paintings limited to an edition of 5 each. The technique inspired by pointillism and impressionism attempts to recreate a sense of human visual perception by varying degrees of selective focus with the surrounding periphery rendered in increasingly block like strokes.

The Vision illusion

Our eyes tend to focus on the detail and our brain fills in the peripheral vision gaps with a kind of map from stored proxies we make on the fly (or from memory if it's a familiar scene to us.) The results are

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BMX Rider Southbank

The images in the series are derived from the artist's personal photographic archive, which has long been source of inspiration in the making, compositing and collaging of digital work. Street photography is a large part of the theme, including this image of a BMX Rider at the iconic and graffitti clad walls of the Southbank Centre in London UK.

DJ Blonde Ambition and the Burning Mazda

Other images in the series include DJ Blonde Ambition performing a set in a shop window on Oxford Street and a striking image of a burning sports car in East London, taken by Outerground on a test shoot with a new LUMIX camera during the London riots, right on the their own doorstep. In the Burning Mazda image, much attention has been paid to the detail in the flames which the eye was naturally drawn to and the detail is graded towards larger strokes towards the periphery.

Buy with ETH or tokens

Each image in the set is priced at 0.25 ETH with unlockable content accompanying each artwork. The content can only be unlocked by the buyer. Other collections by OUTERGROUND on opensea.io are available as biddable auction content starting at around 0.05 ETH with a couple of images starting at 0.00ETH to give wannabe collectors a chance to get in on the ground floor.

The NFT market

In addition to Ethereum names, cryptokitties and other collectibles, opensea.io works pretty much like any other crypto marketplace with trading in ETH and ETH tokens mainly focused on investors attempting to buy up artwork at a cheaper price and then selling on to other collectors for a profit.

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Digital Microcosm

It's the artworld in digital microcosm, but with one important difference. Digital work was difficult to sell before the NON FUNGIBILITY of TOKENS was an option. It's now 100% veracity in your JPG (forever), which is great for digital artists and collectors, but an added bonus of the blockchain (revolution promise) to cut out the middleman.

Opensea.io changes the game, only take (quite proudly) a tiny fraction 2.5% of sales. As an artist, once you've usually sold your precious work through a galllery (often taking a hefty 20-50% of the price) you see no more of the price rise.

But with opensea, due to it's blockchain credentials it can and does track and send you a percentage of every sale thereafter... a percentage which you set yourself. So if you do get discovered and Saatchi sells your artwork on to Peggy G for 100ETH you can pick up the ten percent. I love it. Another round of applause for the blockchain revolution.

Nifty Future

While NFT's have a far more interesting (& useful) future than just artwork and collectibles it's a great start and a massive disruption to the art market, shaking it up for the first time in decades perhaps. There are other platforms which offer the ability to create algorithmically produced.. but for the traditional digital artist (if there is such a thing) opensea offers the ability to sell the work, with provenance locked in.