A 13-year-old artist has become a multi-millionaire by selling her portraits of long-necked women as NFTs.
Nyla Hayes has been drawing since she was little, but recently began producing works of women — including celebrities like Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Lucille Ball — with elongated necks.
With some encouragement from her uncle and help from her mom, she started selling some of her 3,000 portraits as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, earning thousands of dollars for each piece.
Her most expensive NFT — a ‘hand drawn, computer generated collectible out of 3,333 diverse females’ — sold for 4 ETH, or about $11,737, last August, and in total her art has been sold for nearly $7 million.
Nyla has been drawing since she was four, and at nine, her parents bought her a smartphone to encourage her to pursue digital art.
‘I could see how passionate she was about her art and I just thought like, if I could support her in any way. That’s exactly what I’m going to do,’ her mother, Latoya, told NBC News Now.
Her portraits feature women with different skin tones, hairstyles, makeup, and accessories, but each has her signature extra-long neck.
Those necks were inspired by another thing Nyla likes: Brontosaurus dinosaurs.
When she was little, she became fascinated with them, calling them ‘long neckies’ — and she managed to incorporate that into her portraits of women.