SMILING TOY FACES
“The Toy Faces are people who inspired me or played an important role in my life – immortalized on the blockchain forever.”
“Web3 is the culmination of a variety of things at just the right time: tools, products, marketplaces, and community,” Amrit Pal Singh believes. He’s the creator of Toy Faces and Toy Rooms, the wildly popular NFT artworks celebrated for their fun, nostalgic, and childlike wonder. Amrit is a visual artist, 3d illustrator, art director, product designer, and more. He’s also passionate about NFTs and diversity-driven design. The NFT space, and web3 in general, is where all Amrit’s skills, knowledge, and creativity intersect and help him to be creatively fulfilled.
Amrit lives and works in New Delhi, India, and has over a decade’s experience in graphic design. He’s experimented with many mediums and worked most intensely in FinTech, creating finance products.
Feeling burnt out at the end of 2019, he decided to take a creative break to refocus on his love of creative design. He created two card games, Doggo Cards and Monarchs of India, and successfully launched them at Comic-Con. They sold out in a matter of months.
The pandemic put the skids on much of the world, including his work in New Delhi. At the same time as his card game was being developed, Amrit also explored digital design assets for images and assets of people that looked like him. He couldn’t find any diverse illustration sets. So, he put his creative might behind this personal project to make avatars to show different kinds of people from other regions and cultures.
His foresight was perfectly on cue. The demand for digital identities exploded like never before. He created Toy Faces, a nostalgia-driven non-generative portraits created one at a time – but not as NFTs. These were sold as images, and their popularity spread across the Internet: Google execs, Netflix, and others commissioned him to create custom Toy Faces.
The NFT community approached Amrit to create a collection of Toy Faces. He minted just one – and it was instantly bid on. It sold for a staggering 3.9 Eth in December 2020. It signaled the start of his love affair with Toy Faces, web3 and NFTs.
“The Toy Faces are people who inspired me or played an important role in my life – immortalized on the blockchain forever.”
