Dave Van Patten is a Grammy-winning artist and illustrator based in Long Beach, California. His work spans comics, album covers, magazines, murals, and now two NFT collections. His work on the Grateful Dead box set “In and Out of the Garden: Madison Square Garden ‘81 ‘82 ‘83” won the Grammy Award for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package Design in 2023 and he has had work published in NPR, Vice, Hollywood Reporter, L.A. Weekly, and more.

Van Patten's second NFT collection, Monster Party, recently sold out, building on the success of his first launch of Cloudmachine last year. His unique style blending nostalgia, psychedelia, and humor combined with the handcrafted quality of each piece was a big hit with collectors.

OpenSea: To start with the big macro question about your work, what are your biggest inspirations and influences when you create?

Dave Van Patten: There are obviously a lot of visual art influences. But equally important are films and music. I always thought that the best artists are ones who are kind of well-rounded and pay attention to stuff like that.  Art-wise, I love old 1960s comic artists like R. Crumb and even older than that, the cross-hatching style of Edward Gorey. There are some more contemporary comic artists that I really, really like. Simon Hanselman, [who] writes comic books — they're a bit degenerate but have really funny comic timing. As far as style goes, that's more aligned with what I'm going for. I also really like psychedelic work of the 1960s, like Peter Max and Heinz Edelman, the artist who did the artwork for Yellow Submarine.

Also the artwork for this film called Fantastic Planet,  a French film entirely Illustrated in color pencils, and it's just brilliant and really psychedelic and so surrealist. So I'm inspired by retro surrealists and sci-fi art and a lot of punk art posters like Raymond Pettibon. I'm inspired by a lot of film aesthetics like Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, also [Stanley] Kubrick. They're real inspiration for my work, a lot of what's been seen in Cloudmachine and Monster Party was kind of pop culture references.

OpenSea: Knowing that you started out in traditional magazine work and then moved into murals, tell us about your journey into web3 and what drew you into this space?

Dave Van Patten: My cofounder Larry is an old friend who had been a degen for a year or two before we started talking about releasing NFTs. I had been a freelance illustrator for over a decade and I started to kind of forget what my identity was as an artist. We started talking about the Cloudmachine drop in December of the year before and I felt like this was actually gonna be fun. I calculated literally thousands of hours of work put into the project. It really reinvigorated my love for art. And the same with Monster Party! It was a chance to be myself which was really the attraction, the fact that you can do personal work and actually make an income. It's really every artist’s dream. That's what drew me into the space. I was a little nervous because I was an outsider and kind of new, but everyone was very welcoming and I felt like I had just become part of a family. 

OpenSea: That's wonderful and congrats on the sellout of Monster Party. What was the inspiration behind that collection?

Dave Van Patten: I always joke that it was a bit of a masochistic decision because I didn't take much of a break in between collections, maybe a month. I just wanted to keep busy. I didn't want to sink into my couch and live off the accolades of the first collection. It was Larry's idea to do a more genre-based collection and so we thought of monsters and horror films. When I was a kid, maybe 13, really even younger than that, I drew lots of monsters and aliens and so a lot of the monsters that I created were just kind of a throwback to my childhood.

And as far as the actual aesthetics, with Cloudmachine, it was fun because I feel like we did something a bit unique in the sense where the backgrounds played a much bigger role,  the characters were smaller, and the backgrounds were pretty extravagant. This time I wanted to create a PFP more focused on the actual character. It gave me more room to create details in their faces and more personality, and that was a lot of fun. I think that the second collection is actually a lot better In a cohesive sense because it's kind of an evolution from the last one after learning new design tricks and stuff like that.

OpenSea: When you speak about that evolution, how was the process different? What were those things that you learned? What were some of those new tricks you picked up?

Dave Van Patten: I learned more tricks as far as coloring techniques, rethought framing. There's such a thing as making a character too big for a PFP or too small. I feel like I wanted it to be that perfect medium and just big enough to where you can actually have personality and details in the faces. I learned more technical tricks, of course, drawing stuff on my iPad and creating the characters, making them a little bit more clean but also used  colors that pop a little more. I rethought the color palette, and it's similar to the Cloudmachine genesis collection, but it's a little brighter and I think it works better in digital formats, and also I think it'll look really great when we do the physical prints.

OpenSea: Were there physical prints?

Dave Van Patten: Yeah, for the genesis Cloudmachine drop, you could claim a print for your NFTs. There were 12x12 inch prints, which was cool because that's the size of a record frame. Some people claimed dozens of them and they've sent pictures of all their prints in their house and it's great to be able to look at the work. A lot of our community members are niche art collectors where they collect vinyl and rare prints, so we had a lot of support from the community for doing that again.

With Monster Party, we're releasing physical prints and also we partnered with a record label, On-Chain Records where they print your NFT’s image on an actual vinyl disc, the seven-inch, the single size, and the record is fully functional too. We released a couple tracks, so can you play the songs or you can just frame the record on your wall. It's just cool to have more tangible things that come along with the NFT.

OpenSea: You launched Monster Party a couple days before Halloween, but on the day of the mint you cut the supply in half. Walk us through the thought process there.

Dave Van Patten: Good question. Obviously the market is always changing and you really have to stay on your toes and pay attention to it. When we launched the original collection, 4,444 seemed very appropriate. For the second collection. I had done the amount of work for a collection of that size again, but obviously the market is different and It's just a lot harder to mint out a collection of that size.

It seemed like it would just kind of add to the rarity of the pieces but also it seemed like a better choice rather than just kind of leaving the mint open and having some uneven number of mints. I'm a little bummed because there are a lot of cool pieces that haven't gotten to see the light of day, but at the same time the really cool thing is that all the monsters that were part of the collection actually made it, even though the NFTs are randomized. They still all made it into the 2,222, so if you browse the collection, it's still every single monster there. It honestly couldn't have worked out better.

We might release a small handful of ones that are just really, really cool, maybe 200 of them or something. But obviously, we also don't want to diminish the rarity of the pieces. We're kind of still figuring that out and most likely we'll just try to kind of just see if there's an overall community opinion about it and then just go with that.

OpenSea: Nice. Do you know what's next for you in the NFT space? Do you have an idea of what you want to do next or are you more focused on the immediate aftermath of Monster Party?

Dave Van Patten: I think I'm actually more interested in moving forward with some kind of sequels to Monster Party. That's the thing about horror movies. They just come out and keep moving forward. I do want to continue to drop collections as long as I can, but probably if I do something next year, it'll probably be a little smaller because this really did take the wind out of me, doing two collections two years in a row back-to-back. So probably a much smaller thing, but still probably monster-focused.

OpenSea: Who or what else excites you or inspires you and the broader web3 in a space right now?

Dave Van Patten: Since the beginning, the art-focused collections really draw my eye.  We did a lot of stuff with Kreepy Club and I really respect their work. With Junkyard, he does stuff that's kind of reminiscent of old tiny ‘30s cartoons, but they're more on acid and monster-focused.

I really like Cryptoon Goonz. I really like Genuine Undead. It's cool because there's always new stuff that is kind of inspiring me. I used to not really be into pixel art, but after seeing a lot of cool drops with that stuff, you can make pixel art really cool, like Junkyard released a collection of pixel art monsters and it was great. I'm very very inspired by Matt Furie and his collection Hedz is some of the best work I've seen in this space.

OpenSea: What's one thing you want the audience out there to know and where can people find you?

Dave Van Patten: Considering where the market is these days, I really just want to thank everyone who's just hardcore degen and sticking with the space and art-focused projects still. In our project, the focus has never been to just moon hardcore. It's kind of always been that  we're putting high quality work out there and hopefully it moves. We're really just the art-first kind of thing and I just really want to thank everyone for supporting that sort of philosophy and sticking with us, the last couple years. I mean, it just feels like we’re part of a really cool family and I want to thank everyone for continuing to get hyped about these monsters. [You can find me] on X and Instagram.