Proposal: Messhup Residency (Trial)

Hey Nounish fam! Messhup here, I’ve been working for about 8 months with NounsDAO, and I’m finally taking the big leap forward to deliver my best work to the DAO.

In those 8 months I’ve developed several Nounish work:

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• 100 Days of Nouns: A Nounish coloring book series (4 books) with more than 120 unique illustrations/pages (funded by the DAO)
• 1st NounsDAO Coloring Contest: 23 runner ups, 6 winners (60+ entries).
• Lost Nouns: Co-created a Noun extension with the original assets from nouns.
• Noun O’ Talk: 15 Podcast covers (And counting).
• Nouncillors Poap: A honorary piece for the 24 Nouncil Founders.
• Shark Frens: Fundraising to support DelPiero’s son.
• Expanding Nouns Horizons: 1/1 illustration made for the Nervos Network.
• Lil Nouns POAP: Poap for the first 1000 Lil Nouners.
• CoinCenter illustration: Event illustration representing NounsDAO.

What I will do during my residency:

1. Serving the DAO: If the DAO needs illustrations for an event or something similar to the CoinCenter piece, I’ll deliver that (the request needs to be at least 5 days prior to the deadline). The same is true for Nouncillors, I can offer one illustration aside from the monthly honorary piece if they need some graphics for an event or announcement.

2. Noun O’ Talk: I will keep doing artwork for each new episode of the podcast using the same aesthetics and template of the podcast cover.

3. Monthly Nouncilor Honorary Piece: It would be great to receive new Nouncillors with a POAP or an NFT similar to the first Nouncil artwork.

4. Pop Culture go Nounish: Monthly piece similar to my first foundation artwork: LINK

5. Weekly Nounish Livestreams: I’ve made a few livestreams making the coloring books and it’s one of the best ways to break the ice and start interactions between some members. Plus, all the screen recordings could be publicly available and used as assets in future visual productions. These weekly live streams can be made by showing some of the previous deliverables.

Funds requested:
29.07 ETH paid over 3 months (9.69 E/month) paid via Sablier stream.

If this trial happens to be successful and the DAO found it useful, we can set this as an extended residency and optimize the deliverables accordingly to their needs.

I’m open to your suggestions, thanks so much for reading

Messhup is an incredibly talented and generous artist - one of the first to proliferate Nouns through an illustrative lens. I would love to see him in residency at Nouns DAO!

Thank you so much ser

I’ve always been fascinated by his work and the story behind it, , @messhup, for the residency

Love your work @messhup and would love to see this.
I like the idea of nouncillor NFT too of course

There’s talk of tokenisation of voting with nouncil, might be a good idea to chat with @joelcares about this to potentially use your artwork as the NFTs used for voting should that system come about.

As a consumer of Messhups art, he is GOAT territory. There is a wholesome look to his depictions of nouns that just works for so many ppl.

Just fell in love with Messhup’s work at first sight. Can I request something Messhup? 6. Art Live Session with Messhup every Friday Night @ 9PM EST. Haha just joking! Love to see this pass

i am a big fan of Messhup’s and i support his continued work on this project! i sponsored the coloring book project and consider it and the coloring contests to be a huge success for the DAO

i could potentially support this as a trial but i think the onus is on Messhup to justify drawing a $10k monthly salary, as opposed to just being paid ad hoc for specific deliverables

Messhup, how much time per day/week do you spend drawing Nounish art? how much time would you be able to devote to this if the proposal is a success?

Thanks, @Zeeraffe @Benbodhi @krel, and @Voadz!!!
Really appreciate your support guys, and yes I was thinking since the beginning to make this kind of proposal to Nouncil, I guess I have no excuse now haha
And Voadz, that would be a good time for me tbh , but could set a date with more members of the DAO as well

Yesser! Thanks for your support.
Those are great questions, just want to clarify that I’m not asking for $10k monthly, the proposal is about 9.69 ETH per month.

I’m planning to work on this 40 hours per week. Being paid ad hoc is also an option, but sometimes the schedule for some projects can cause overlap and that is translated into two things:

1. Delays, or lowering the quality for one of them,
2. Working long hours during the whole night but not being compensated for that because that’s out of the scope of the project which is understandable but actually erodes the relationship between the artist and the business (That’s my experience with web2 clients btw, I haven’t seen that at Nouns).

Being part of the DAO is more reliable for both parties because it would meet my disposition to keep working with the org and the availability that I have to make that happen, not to mention that the work conditions are way better only because there are specific work hours, and the time I’m mentioning would be exclusively for the DAO, that’s the only way I can achieve the quality that I’m offering.

Drawing is not the only thing that has to be done here, it is almost 30% of the work actually.
Every illustration has to go through a process of exploration and iteration that’s not visible to the public. Usually one has to take references and even make “mood boards” to convey a specific message for every single piece, try different color palettes, and very frequently as in the example below, the work requires updates. All of that is actually time-consuming to achieve something with a certain quality.

Here is a small example of the exploration process as mentioned above:

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ok? the value of that 9.69 ETH is $12,000

cool, this is what i think it would be helpful for you expand upon to get support within the dao. can you please expand on what you would be doing during those 40 hours? do you currently have 40 hours of things you work on for Nouns right now?

you do really fantastic work and i support you from SG for ad hoc stuff all the time - and i will continue to support you and even scale up the stuff the DAO can think up for you to do. but $12,000 a month to be on retainer doesn’t seem like the best fit. i am not opposed at all to you getting compensated for your amazing work time and energy. in fact, i would support an even larger compensation if you could think up another big proposal like the coloring book one

Working full-time for the DAO. My skills can be applied on several places, like Prophouse, 1click Nouns DAO, Nouncil, or some event in which the DAO needs to be represented, like the coincenter illustration, or other community projects. I know some projects need to use images, banners, or something visual.

• Right now? No.
• But I actually did, the coloring books (110+ unique handmade pages + covers), usually around 75 hours per week (sometimes more) all add up to 1200+ hours in about 5 months.

Thank you ser, but there’s no need for a bigger compensation, or a bigger proposal from my side (this proposal is actually really big for me right now). And if the DAO doesn’t like the end result, or actually doesn’t need artists as residents, it is very easy to just avoid an extended residency. That’s why this is just a trial.

I believe that the most Nounish thing to do is to have the proposal on-chain, and know what the DAO thinks through the voting mechanism (I know that some Nouners are busy to send their feedback but that would help as well). And if the proposal is rejected, I’ll still be building around Nouns and try to expand this amazing community with the skills I have.

Trying to find a phrasing here that is easier to take a leap of faith on:

Messhup will work for NounsDAO 40h/week for 1 month. This is an experiment to figure out if there is a greater need for artwork by Messhup in different forms, for different types of media. If there is not, the contract ends after 1 month. If a need has been identified, Messhup will write a new prop for a residency extension but the extension needs to go into further detail re what the work entails.
Messhup asks for 10 ETH for the trial.

I think the cost of not exploring the unknown can be far greater than the hit to our treasury.

I come back to that we don’t learn anything without spending eth. We might learn that this is not a great fit for an artist, or that we want even more artists on a similar program. But we need to run the experiment to know.

Love this ethos. Don’t have a vote but experimenting is the only way to learn what works and what doesn’t. the balance of a 1 month trial to learn feels right

hi @messhup . if you are up for it, SG would sponsor a 1 month trial for 5 ETH. during this trial, it would be on you to demonstrate that you are either:
A. able to make Nouns your full time job and create a months worth of quality work that the DAO likes, in which case i would be supportive of a residency (ie: not just be responsive to requests for a month, but create a months worth of work for yourself)
B. can use this time to figure out a big project for an on chain proposal that i will sponsor

what do you think?

Thanks Krel and Atareh for joining and sharing your thoughts! I liked the 1-month range for the project btw. It’s cool to get more feedback to validate the idea.

After a lot of thought, the best approach IMHO is to take the time to work on multiple art pieces to proliferate Nouns as much as possible, but without taking the 5 eth nor working in this trial as a resident. That being said, I’m still open to work with the DAO if they need individual pieces for an event, or something like the coincenter illustration.

In the meantime, I will keep working on several ideas and proposals I’m developing and will share them when the time comes to get your feedback, thanks so much for your time