How to make an NFT for free!

Omen Media
Feb 4, 2022
2 min read

Updated: Feb 25, 2022

NFT's are trending and digital artists from around the world are jumping on the bandwagon. We'll discuss how to make and sell an NFT for free.

Bored Ape #5384 by Bored Ape Yacht Club - Owned by Diplo

What is minting?

Making an NFT actually goes further than just designing a picture. To officially become an NFT it would need to go through a process called minting.

Minting is the process of linking an item to the blockchain. This of course costs money in "gas fees" due to the computational power needed to solve blockchain equations which help NFT's become non-fungible.

To work around the gas fees one could use the Polygon to mint an NFT. "Polygon solves pain points associated with Blockchains, like high gas fees and slow speeds, without sacrificing on security" - Polygon.

Designing an NFT

Now that you know what minting is, we can talk about the designing aspect of an NFT. NFT's can be anything from pixel art, photography, videos, or even GIFs. For the sake of the tutorial, we'll be discussing picture designs for NFT's.

Design software

To make this NFT 100% free you could use Microsoft Paint for Windows users or Paintbrush for Mac users.

Use these free programs to design an image you think someone would buy.

Step 1

Open MS Paint and resize the image so that it's square. Resizing the image is optional as you are able to sell NFT's of different dimensions. For this NFT we will be making a perfect square to follow the album cover style of most NFT's. If you choose to make a square - select "Pixels" and deselect "Maintain aspect ratio". A square image needs to have the same amount of pixels horizontally and vertically eg. 500 x 500.

Step 2

Create your design. It can be anything, so feel free to get creative. Try to avoid anything explicit as you may get flagged. Here's our quick design using MS Paint.

Step 3

Now that you have a design go to opensea.io and select "create".

Step 4

Connect your E-wallet or create an account. MetaMask is easy to set up and user-friendly. Remember to write down your "Secret Recovery Phrase" as you will need this to log in.

Step 6

Create a collection to store your NFT's.

Step 6

NB! Select Polygon blockchain - Selecting Ethereum will cost you upfront gas fees. Polygon only charges gas fees once the NFT is minted so there are no upfront costs.