Artists Raaj Rufaro, Pakhi Verma, Midhundas KS, Vishnu Venu, Christhika Lakshmi and Najeeb Thottungal have collaborated with gaming start-up Striker, where the latter will use their digital cricket art as in-game assets on its platform. This association will help the young artists to showcase their digital art to a larger audience and monetize their work effectively.
Seeking inspiration from the sport, these independent artists have tried combining art with technology along with stylized treatments to create interesting fan art portraying cricketing heroes. Striker will use these digital cricket artworks as game cards, which users can trade while playing the game.
Talking about his experience with this collaboration, artist Thottungal said it was a massive leap in learning for him. “Not only did I get better insights into character anatomy, but I also got a deeper understanding of other aspects of illustrations such as lighting, shadows, rendering, materials etc.,” he stated.
Rufaro called cricket art as game cards a brilliant idea, which will empower artists and transform how they monetize art, in addition to assisting them in creating new projects and taking ownership of their creations. He added, “With the help of this collaboration, we could dive deep and create multiple pieces of cricket art, which the cricketers inspired, but the representations were unique to our imagination."
Krishna Mohan Vedula and Nitesh Jain, who earlier worked at Mobile Premier League, head the Bengaluru-based Web3 start-up Striker. Users can collect player cards, which they can use indefinitely, to play fantasy games with them or trade these for real money on the platform.
Sports memorabilia is part of the $412 billion global collectibles industry, which according to a Market Decipher report, is expected to reach $692.4 billion by 2032. More than 60 million collectors are involved in purchasing and trading sports memorabilia.
Amongst the earliest entrants in this space in India was the Terra Virtua platform, which partnered with Hero Indian Super League (ISL) in November 2021 to debut its digital collectibles series comprising 27,500 team posters and 242,000 trading cards. This allowed football fans in the country to own a piece of their favourite club and players in the digital world.
