thr33som3s
OH, THE BASEBALL CARD GUY???
“My art has taken me from that 9-year-old alone in the mountains, living in my head, to a project absolutely full of the best friends I’ve had in my entire life.”
From the simplest of childhood pastimes of collecting baseball cards has grown into one of the most prolific and dynamic NFT art collections.
From a solitary kid growing up in the deep rurals, thr33som3s has taken his art to another level and is enjoying every moment of his latest incarnation. “From that 9-year-old with no friends around and living in his head, I now have the most and the best friends of my life.”
Leaving the corporate world behind, thr33som3s set out to become the world’s most famous NFT artist – and within 6 weeks, he’d minted his first piece, which was an immediate sell-out. From zero to hero; he’d never shared any of his IRL art before, nor had he bought or sold any NFTs, and suddenly he had built a universe around his intricately painted vintage baseball cards. The painting process is intricate and painstaking and can take up to 30 hours for each piece.
“I paint physically on actual vintage baseball cards from the Sixties and Seventies into the Eighties. I rework the cards that serve as a canvas but rework them into cards of a parallel universe.”
Many of thr33som3s’ devout collectors, The Grotto, are outside the US with no history or context for collecting baseball cards, but NFTs allow them to participate conceptually through the blockchain.
thr33som3s knows every Grotto Member personally and maintains strict control of the activity within his community, managing The Grotto Discord group where every drop happens live. He even has his own crypto coin called 3Penny.
“I was the first ever artist on Nifty Gateway to run my own contract. I handle drop mechanics. I handle distribution. I handle the whole thing.”
“These are pretty complex mechanics that the collectors had to understand and be comfortable with,” he says, so his work and interaction with his community are all built on trust. thr33som3s brings a lot of integrity into a space that sometimes has the reputation of having none.
thr33som3s’ philosophy is simple: do whatever it takes to maintain and drive value for collectors, and never fuck anyone over, and he expects the same of others.
A mention of thr33som3s is incomplete without reference to thr33zi3s, the first ever hand-painted generative art on the blockchain. He lets the collectors’ interaction with the blockchain determine the subject matter of each thr33zi3s and individually handpaints the result.