art.sol is a platform where aspiring NFT artists can showcase their work, test it, and get tipped by users. It's a way for them to grow their brand and community while also validating their artwork and generating some extra income along the way.
Don't want to be an artist? You might still find the platform valuable as a way to "put your work out there" and get feedback. Not to mention the tips that you could receive if users think your art is 🔥
This dApp runs on the solana chain, so you first need a phantom wallet and a trivial amount of SOL (solana's native token). Don't have phantom? Get it by clicking the ghost -> 👻. Once you have your wallet, get at least $1 worth of SOL by buying it directly through phantom or transferring it from another wallet like Coinbase.
Once you have everything set up, go to art.sol. If you're on desktop and you have the phantom chrome extension, then you should go directly to the app. If you're on mobile, however, you must open it from the in-app browser of the Phantom app for it to work. We know that this is not ideal.
Once you get to the app, you should see something like this:
Click on connect wallet and the phantom extension should pop up if you're on desktop:
If you want to use art.sol, click connect and your screen should now look something like this:
Okay, now onto the fun part.
Click on the button that says "Post my art 🎨" and you should see this:
Fill in the boxes and create your post! Make sure your art is not only stored locally on your computer and that it's uploaded somewhere so that art.sol can access it.
When you click "Post!" the Phantom wallet extension should pop up again and request for you to approve the transaction. Why is this a transaction? Well, art.sol is posting your art to the Solana blockchain so that users can tip you with SOL and so that your work can't be taken down by any centralized party. As the signer of the transaction, you need to approve it and pay a very small gas fee. We don't get the money from this fee, it's a network fee that keeps the Solana network running.
Once you approve the transaction, refresh the app and you should see your post! It should look something like this:
Congratulations, your post is live!
If you're a user or an artist wanting to help out your fellow creatives then you might want to tip artists and upvote & star their posts. Keep in mind that these are all transactions because they're literally editing the post data on the Solana chain or sending tokens across the network. You can't undo these actions
You can upvote or downvote any post. To upvote a post, click on the up arrow at the bottom of the post, make sure not to click the down arrow! Once you click the arrow, the phantom extension will prompt you to approve the transaction. Approve it and you should see that post's points go up by 1! To downvote a post just click the down arrow and approve the transaction. You should the post's points go down by 1.
You can also star any post. Simply click on the star icon at the bottom of a post and approve the transaction. The post's stars should go up by 1.
To tip an artist of a post, click the tip artist button and you should see this on your screen:
Enter the amount of SOL you want to tip and click "Tip SOL" and approve the transaction. Congratulations! You just helped out an artist using the power of web3!