By Pepe The Ordinals Expert

Tinted Shades are 69 hand drawn portraits by Rhiannon. 29 inscribed under 20k 40 under 70k on #Bitcoin.

Was it hard to hand draw the Tinted Shades collection?

Tinted Shades is a collection of all my most recent illustrations. I never really thought of them as a whole until I started viewing them as an NFT collection. Themes of faces, moods and emotions that maybe we hide from one another juxtaposed with our everday lives and appearances came to my mind. The more fantasy-like, darker portraits filled the role of the parts of ourselves we hide from each other, our Shades, while the normie portraits are who we show each other. Both the Shades and the normies can be both positive and negative, and depending on the Shade and the normie portrait, it can either be about embracing our Shade or letting it go.

When did you find out about ordinals and what made you decide to inscribe Tinted Shades?

My brother messaged me not too long ago and said that I had created the perfect NFT collection without knowing it. He briefly described bitcoin and NFTs and said that we have to inscribe it on the bitcoin blockchain asap. I barely knew what he was talking about but I figured he knew what he was doing. Soon after he starts messaging me saying my art is in the first 70k inscriptions and that we have to make a twitter and start selling them. That’s basically how it got started. I’ve kinda been pulled into this, it was very much unexpected, but I’ve learned so much already and now I can’t see pursuing my art without NFTs.

How does Tinted Shades push the boundaries of art, culture and freespeech?

My brother said that he wanted to get an artists work in the low inscriptions. He said it’s always investors and speculators that get in first on a new tech, and he wanted to give an artist a fair shot. There is no shortage of incredible artists making NFTs on eth, but most of them came to it much later. They still have great success on eth, but I don’t see many of them coming over to ordinals yet. My brother said that if we could inscribe my art early on it could possibly make bitcoin NFTs more inviting to artists that maybe aren’t the most tech savvy or investor minded. It’d be the dream but if we were able to inspire any artists to come over to ordinals I’d be extremely humbled and feel like we played a role in getting more artists a front role in this emerging and empowering tech.