Create a 1000 piece NFT collection on SUI with Midjourney, Photoshop, and Shadow.
I was a bit skeptical when I saw @EmanAbio post about buying an NFT from a new launchpad/marketplace called @shadow_sui https://shadow.app/drops on the @SuiNetwork. I have used a lot of NFT marketplaces to try and mint my own work, (it’s a little hobby of mine) and I usually run into some snag at one point or another. Super high fees, or some convoluted procedure for uploading the art are usually the norm.
Testing out different ways to mint my art is a little side hobby of mine, and I actually had a pleasant experience using @shadow_sui. I have not received any sponsorships or compensation for this article from anyone. But, I do hold a little $sui, which is obviously required if you’re going to create NFTs. No legal or financial advice here, just information to help you on your personal artistic journey.
Creating the art.
I used the web version of @midjourney to create my Walrus Warriors. Up until I made this series, I was a die hard Discord user, but the tools provided on the web version made this a bit easier. @shadow_sui requires you to have at least five layers, with six variations in each of those layers. My five layers were the background, the body, the eyes, nose, and tusks. The easiest one for me to start with was the background because I just used a flat color.
Midjourney’s upscaled images are 2048 x 2048, so I used Photoshop to create six different background colors and exported them as 2048 x 2048 PNG files. PNG files are necessary because they have transparency.
Next was the basic style. Everyone has their own way to generate images, so I won’t go into that. I created one image that I felt had the overall “look” I was happy with. Here’s that image:
Now that I had the “look”, I needed to break it down so I could generate the separate layers. To do that, I isolated the eyes, nose, and tusks from the major body portion, and generated a bunch of variations of the bodies. I used the Midjourney full editor to erase the portion I wanted to regenerate for variations.
I selected 6 different bodies from those that were generated and moved onto the eyes, nose, and tusks. Essentially repeating the process, making sure the was a small border around each feature so they would all blend together seamlessly. As I found the variations I liked, I upscaled them, and saved them into an individual folder for each layer. Here’s those three basic breakdowns:
At this point, I had all of my images stored into separate folders. My folder structure had a root folder titled walruswarriors. Inside that folder I had folders representing my layers titled bg (for background), bodies, eyes, nose, tusks. Inside each of those folders, I had six images for each of the variations.
Editing and organizing your layers.
This is where the work can get a bit tedious, but once you get a nice flow going, it’s not too bad. There are a million ways to do this, some I’m sure more efficient, but this is how I did it. Each variation will be its own layer, so you need to erase everything except the variation you want to keep. Then feather the layer slightly to make sure it blends in nicely. I did this by screenshotting my mask from Midjourney, bringing that into Photoshop, creating a new mask, moving it to my variations, and deleting everything I didn’t need.
It’s very hard to explain, so here is a 34-second video of me cutting out and feathering a nose to hopefully be more clear:
That process was required for every variation in every layer. Five layers times six variations (6 x 5 =30), minus the five background images so 25 variations total. That’s the minimum required by @shadow_sui, you can always do more.
Minting on Shadow
Now that all of the layers are organized and cut out, it’s time to move onto the minting process.
I used the Sui Wallet extension in Chrome as that is still a very common way to connect with different apps. I went to Shadow App, connected my wallet, and hit “Create”. This will take you to the “New collection” page which only requires a name for the collection, a description, and the folder with the images in it.
Once you upload your folder, you’ll be shown how large the files are just in case you need to make any changes.
After you hit the save button, your images are uploaded and you are taken to the order layers page to organize the layers in the correct order. This is pretty self explanatory. Since my nose, eyes, and tusks didn’t overlap, I only needed to make sure the background layers was at the bottom, and the head was next, with everything else on top.
After saving the order, the next screen allows you to assign the rarity. There are six rarities. Common, Uncommon, Rare, Super Rare, Ultra Rare, and Extra Rare. This will change how the variations are spread out across the 1000 piece collection. I don’t have specific numbers or percentages of each rarity. Sorry!
After you select your rarities and save it. You click a small arrow to move onto the Generation section. This is where you can see all 1000 of your pieces and filter them out on the left, if you want. You can also regenerate them if you don’t like the spread. This is also where you can see how your layers line up with each other. If you’re happy with it, click on the arrow to move on. You’re almost done!
This is where your images get moved to a decentralized storage area (not sure who Shadow is using), a contract is created, and you start the sale of the NFTs. I did not screenshot or record this full process the first time, and don’t want to make a duplicate collection. I’m confident anyone familiar with using a crypto wallet will be able to make it through to the end.
After all was said and done, the total fees to create the contract and start the sale was about 3 $Sui total. At the current price, that’s about $9 USD. Not bad at all for a 1000 piece collection.
I purchased 3 of my own pieces to see if it actually worked and to check if they showed up in my wallet. Sometimes, NFTs will not show up in your wallet despite them actually being there. I won’t go into the technical details, but I hate it when that happens. Fortunately, that was not the case here and my NFT’s, along with a couple purchases I made did show up.
Things I disliked.
Of course, not everything can be rainbows and butterflies, especially with new tech. While the overall process was great, here are things I hope the @shadow_sui team will improve on, or will be more clear with in the future.
- Where are my images stored? I couldn’t find anywhere that stated where my images would be stored. Just the words, “decentralized storage”. Is that IPFS, Arweave, somewhere else? It would be awesome if it could be Walrus once it goes to Mainnet.
- There is no verification process? I connected my X profile to my collection, but that was it. For the more nefarious people, who are numerous in this space, it seems like it would be pretty easy to create what appear to be legit collections. I don’t see how or what @shadow_sui is doing to combat that. Not that they aren’t doing something, I just didn’t see it anywhere.
- Royalties would be nice. Pretty self explanatory. It would be nice to attach royalties once the mint is done, but not a big deal if they decide against it. I’m not sure how Sui handles NFT royalties on the back end either, so it might not even be possible to enforce.
- Couldn’t see my description anywhere after the mint? I wrote a description for my collection, but didn’t see it anywhere in the UI after the collection was created.
- A forum or some way to chat with the team if there are problems. The only way I see to communicate with the team is to send a message through X, or to chat with them on the web site. That seems pretty limited, so hopefully there will be additional ways to connect in the future.
Thank you for reading, and good luck!
Thanks for reading my first article on X! This project was a learning experience, combining AI art, some technical challenges with masking, and NFTs in general. I hope this guide helps others on their artistic and NFT journeys!
