If you were in Miami during December, you may have seen a Pudgy Penguins club night. Cole Thereum, the founder of Pudgy Penguins was present. He was surrounded by penguin art and etched into ice .. Antoine Mingo was also there, sipping a gin-and-tonic in the back, but he kept his profile low. Although he drew the bodies and faces of the penguins’ heads, his connection to this project has been kept under the radar. He was not recognized by anyone at the party, unlike Cole.

The Miami event marked a turning point in Mingo’s unconventional career as a NFT artist. Tokens built from his art have sold for upwards of $400,000 even as he remains largely on the sidelines. The founders of Pudgy Penguins are the true leaders in the NFT world. They coded the variations and promoted the project to potential buyers. Mingo’s case is a good example of this. The visual artists are considered hired guns. They also benefit from the boom mainly through their reputation.

Mingo started to take an interest in art when he was in school in Woodbridge, Virginia. He began drawing portraits of his favorite players and tried to capture the details of the game. He began to take on smaller commissions as he grew older. First, he created album art for Woodbridge rappers. Then, he made logos for local businesses. Each gig lead to the next.

” I was trying to find my niche. He says that he wasn’t sure who he was selling to. “Work just fell into my hands .”

After graduating, he began at a community college to learn the rules of typography and graphic design. These skills were essential, but he was disappointed by the slow growth of his freelance business. He recalls that time as a low point of his career as an artist. He says, “Honestly, I didn’t even know [clients] were into art that much.”

Looking for new challenges, Mingo found his way to Upwork, a gig-work platform for graphic designers. Upwork is controversial with some artists — particularly its 20 percent cut and sometimes abrupt labor policies — but for Mingo, it was perfect. Mingo was able find gigs all over the globe, sometimes paying more than his local clients. He was able to see the portfolios of other artists and get advice. He started his career designing rugby jerseys for an Australian client. He began to drift into logo design and learned the techniques that make it work on the platform. Although he still needed to work part-time to survive, he was beginning to master the game.

Then, he was offered a job for an NFT project. He had no idea about NFTs, but he did know that cryptocurrency was volatile and that a friend of his had lost a lot money when he tried to time the market incorrectly. The pay was only $150 at first, more for consulting and batting around ideas than producing a finished product. He was not used to cartoons and the NFT trait system on which most NFT collections are based was completely new to him.

“I’m normally a realism artist but [the founder] really wanted me to draw these simple penguins,” he remembers. “When I was drawing them, in the back of my mind was the penguins from Mario 64.”

The Pudgy Penguins founder, Cole Thereum, showed him how to build separate traits over the same base penguin shape, so the trait can be swapped in and out to create new tokens. Antoine created a series of hats, clothes, glasses, and color schemes — more than 100 unique traits in total. As an additional rare find, there were penguins with different backgrounds and themes. Once Mingo handed off the traits, developers combined them into 8,888 images, the first batch of Pudgy Penguin NFTs. The finished product came with a huge payday: $23,000 in dollars and $37,000 in Ethereum.

Cole Thereum reached out two weeks later, raving about the project’s success. Mingo didn’t know that Pudgy Penguins was so successful, as Mingo did not have any connection to NFT Twitter. The founders appeared on CNN and Bloomberg TV soon after, with many people comparing them to the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Without knowing it, Mingo had become the artist for one of the biggest NFT collections ever made.

“Everything changed,” he says. “I had a wild view of it all. It was all just a spectacle .”

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He no longer had to search for commissions on Upwork. Instead, people were approaching him to make NFT collections for them — such as with the Unbanked NFT project. He continued to be involved with Pudgy Penguins, creating a second collection and content for their website and social media channels. He was invited to Miami’s party, but it wasn’t enough to make him the centre of all the action. Pudgy Penguins was not his best client but it was one of many.

When scandal hit, he was as shocked as everyone else. Twitter user @9x9x9eth posted a thread explaining that Cole Thereum, the founder of Pudgy Penguins, had emptied the project’s treasury before looking to sell the company for 888 ETH (over $2 million). Soon Cole was expelled from his company. Mingo was involved in one of the most infamous betrayals of the NFT scene.

“I felt a little betrayed,” Mingo says, “but not to the point where I wanted to say something crazy online.” A few months later, LA-based entrepreneur Luca Netz bought Pudgy Penguins from Cole and started up the project again, launching a new headquarters in Miami and setting plans for a book.

Mingo is planning a move to Miami soon too, following Pudgy Penguins and the broader buzz around crypto art. He still sits in his same room as he did last year, at the exact desk where the Pudgy Penguin artwork is created.

It’s not the usual reward for an artist whose work is selling for six figures — but there are other kinds of satisfaction. Mingo still remembers the moment he saw that Steph Curry had bought a Pudgy Penguin. Mingo had to step back from the computer and return to the feeling that got him started drawing.

“It was confirmation that I was good enough. Mingo stated that I needed it to keep going. “If I kept going the same way, I don’t think I would still be drawing the way that I am now .