For a more comprehensive look at Jim Evans, listen to this week’s episode of the Lights Camera Crypto podcast where he talks more about his web3 journey and how he’s achieved success.

Jim Evans knows what it means to be an artist.

With over half a century worth of experience creating album covers, movie posters, rock posters, commercial art, animated movie titles and logos for some of the biggest names in entertainment—like Beastie Boys, Aerosmith, Anderson Paak, Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers—Evans has seen the art world transform and evolve throughout the decades, especially in its relationship to advances in tech.

“When Lalapalooza came along in the early 90s, I noticed that a lot of people were getting on their computers,” Evans said to me in a recent conversation. “I heard about America Online and how you could upload images with music behind them, so I started creating electronic press kits for music producers Rick Rubin and Marc Geiger, and eventually became a bit more web savvy with the digital production of using fonts on the web.”

After a fire burned down his Malibu home in 1993 and he lost most of his original art to the flames, Evans became fully committed to going digital. 

“If another fire ever came and I had all of my stuff on the computer, I could literally just throw the computer in the car instead of running up to my closet and trying to carry a thousand pieces of paper and trying to load that into my car—which would never be able to happen.”

Computers also helped Evans move faster. Instead of having to hand-draw everything at every stage of his process, he would draw something quickly, scan it and start doing line and vector composition to assemble posters more quickly—resulting in a huge increase in output. By using digital fonts and being able to enlarge graphic elements on his screen, Evans could put together a poster in half a day as opposed to a week that it would take in some cases for the same type of work.

A Jim Evans classic

His company TAZ comprised a handful of people working together as opposed to just Evans, and they collaborated in the digital world in a way they couldn’t have done previously without the tech.

“Everyone didn’t need to be in the same one spot working together,” Evans said. “Instead, they could send files back and forth, make film, send it off to silkscreeners, make screens and print the poster in a much faster way than before.”

Evans is seeing a similar gear shift today to decades ago—this time with web3 technology increasing the speed with which he can create his works and connecting him with his fans, collectors and other audiences in a much more intimate way.

“Web3 and blockchain are helping make my career—and all of my work—ever present in a way that it wasn’t before,” he said. “I realized that with blockchain, I could take close to 10,000 pieces of my work and collectibles and create one giant repository of everything. Everyone can see it, I can see it, and it’s got a mathematical equation that helps authenticate it.”

In this way, web3 is helping elevate Evans' work to the next level—helping expand it into a larger electronic enterprise in a way he’s never been able to before.

“I get a lot of people DMing me about some obscure poster they want,” he said. “With blockchain, someone will be able to see how many posters I have left of the one they want. If they buy it, I’ll then be able to follow that purchase wherever it goes.”

Evans marveled at the idea of being able to catalog his entire body of work on-chain and the ability to track where all of his art is located.

“Try to imagine if I could follow everything I’ve ever sold in my life,” he said. “We’d be going back to 1968 for my first album cover. At one point for my Surfer magazine stuff, there was a guy who came out from the East Coast and bought all of my works that had to do with surfing. It was great to make all of that money in one day, but I still wonder where all of that stuff is.”

Fortunately, blockchain is helping Evans and other artists catalog their work, helping to verify to potential buyers that what they’re seeing digitally available is also what’s physically available.

“With blockchain and the work I’m doing with Kreatr, I can not only keep track of my work, but I’ll keep ahead of it,” Evans said. “I’ve got stuff in storage bins in Venice, I’ve got stuff upstairs in drawers [in Malibu], and now it will all be in one place.”

Blockchain is also providing a real-time inventory and end-to-end tracking of where his art is going when purchased by collectors on chain.

An Evans poster for this fantastic movie

“The new technology is not only fascinating, it’s vital for art to move forward,” Evans said. “Blockchain opens up your entire archive—literally to the entire planet and the future. Obviously I’m not going to live forever, so with web3, anybody in my family can carry on and know where all of my stuff is, rather than go, ‘Oh, Jim died, let’s go dig through all his crap.’”

After creating nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and animating art for other people, Evans figured he could create the same art for himself. He wanted to create a world that could exist on the blockchain—Simulation Warriors—with a built-in crew, each with their own backstories.

“Without web3, I’d have no reason to do this,” he said. “I would have put it in a closet. Blockchain brings vitality to it and brings it to life a lot more quickly without really needing gigantic partners. I can do most of it myself or with my crew.”

It also helps that web3 tech allows fans and collectors to engage with art and the artists in a much more interactive way and on a much larger scale than was previously available.

“It also seems like it’s more democratic in terms of the audience engaging with the artist,” Evans said. “With Sim Warriors, I’m reaching out to an audience I wouldn’t normally have. It’s way beyond a poster—it’s more like an animated movie or something like that.”

In many ways, the future Evans envisioned as an artist and storyteller has finally aligned with the available technology to create an ecosystem where it’s easier to find a specific artist, where the artist can create community alongside fans and where more like-minded fans can digitally congregate around a specific artist’s work.

“The current tech situation definitely puts you in contact with an audience in a way you never were able to before,” Evans said. “The interlinking and communal structure of this electronic apocalypse is like having your own two-way tv show with everybody who's ever liked your work or will like your work. I wouldn’t fight this technology.”