5TezCollection: Year 2

But soon I realized there were all sorts of projects that cost fractions of 1 tez, and sometimes even nothing.

I spent all night combing through project after project. And what I thought was only gonna take a couple hours took two days. I had covid remember, so my wife brought me soup while I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled.

At the end of my long journey, to my surprise, I had found 13 total pieces.

The entire collection and story can be seen here: https://twitter.com/WrensNFT/status/1540916509291298821?s=20

This year, I'm hoping to take what I've learned from last year and find even more good stuff. Let's see how it goes.

First up some guidelines. I've opted to avoid collecting what I collected last year. I've seen other galleries this year with some of my favorite pieces I picked up last year, and as much as it hurts to not put cool, free pieces in the gallery, I'm gonna try to find new undiscovered gems.

Also, I'm going to try and avoid adding projects from artists without names, or at the very least, without a twitter account. After all, one of the great thrills of collecting is picking up pieces from artists you admire, that are driving towards an Ouvre.

First up the FX hash pieces. When dealing with a project in which you can only spend 5 tez, FX is gonna be the top shelf marketplace. Or maybe it's just harder to find < 1 tez pieces. Fortunately a collector named EmptyOcean.tez had several tasty pieces for less than a taco. Shout out to the artist, UpOnlyFan, who minted a favorite low budget project of mine called Etude, and another called Verse. I own several Etudes (no Verses) but I wasn't able to add either of these pieces to my gallery simply because I ran out of money. But I just love the art, and some other smart collectors picked up nice looking pieces for ~.25 tez.

Hold on, what's this, I was able to collect an UpOnlyFan. A beautiful piece called Poppy.

After my UpOnlyFan fun, I searched artist/collector Sarah Zucker's collection on FX. I searched her collection because in the past I've noticed like Artnome, she collects without any worry about the financial prospects of the projects. It's purely for the love of the art. So there's an intentionality behind her collection. There's also expensive artists sitting alongside obscure, undiscovered gems. Cheap gems. I had previously seen the artist Photoevaporation while searching FX, and most of their stuff is pricey, however there was one piece for 1 tez that was just so goddamn dreamy I had to pick it up. So I did. A pink and red hued animated dazzler called Waves. It must be seen in motion to truly be appreciated. And appreciated I did, so I put it front and center as the top piece in my Gallery.

Next up we journeyed over to Objkt to pick up two FREE pieces from Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez. Free. As in, nothing. Too good to be true right? Wrong. They cost zero tez.

But that's not the only free stuff we got from legendary artists. Have you ever heard of someone named Ciphrd? A couple days before, Lonliboy in Discord alerted PD that there was a test project of his that was free, so I ran over within seconds and got one. For Free! Thanks Lonliboy!

I wanted to keep the big names coming, so I collected a Desultor, a Robness, and a Haydiroket. 3 big names I collected for a total of .88 tez. As of this writing that's 78 cents. A taco from Tacobell cost more than that in 1985.

The fun just kept coming, I added some AI art, some photos, some animations, some Gen art, some digital stuff, and even made a piece myself to add as many pieces as I could get for 5 tez. I don't want to spoil every piece I got. Best to leave some surprises. I recommend going to my Gallery to see more: https://gallery.so/wrens

At the end of the long journey. I collected, curated, and cheap-skated my way to 24 pieces. I couldn't be happier, I recommend everyone go through this exercise. There's a lot to be learned and a lot of fun to be had. Look forward to doing this again next summer. Thanks for stopping by.

Cheers,

Wrens