My mom's been painting longer than I've been alive.
It was her hobby and she sold through local events, friendly galleries, word of mouth commissions. She was always opposed to pushing it online because of the "cold" lack of community.
Long story short, this summer I finally orange and purple pilled her. We decided to try something a little wild: sell her art for Bitcoin only, over Lightning, direct to her wallet and try to build a community on Nostr over time.
So I built her a simple site: https://mavilab.art.
All the descriptions and pictures are managed and created directly by her and we wired up a lightning wallet with Blink API so payments go straight to her wallet. Should the experiment go well, in the future it would be trivial to migrate fully self custodial running a LND instance for her, but for now I would say this setup is already great.
The site runs on a tiny 30 Euro thinclient at her house, we bought a couple years back to run Plex for self hosted movies and shows. It really doesn't take that much to run your own stuff and be self sovereign!
The next step would be great to build over time is the community. We spun up a Nostr profile for her and I'm teaching her the basics: picking a client, setting a clean bio, adding a Lightning address for zaps.
You can say Hi! here:
https://jumble.social/users/nprofile1qqsz2659yhutgha8kll3sr95kzfascwunsq0znz30h4r2ysynwk339cpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsyf0pur
The vibe we're aiming for is personal and open, no "cold marketing," more "here's what I'm making and why" and personal connections. I do believe this is what decentralized community and payment systems allow for!
So in short, if you collect a piece from her, you're not just buying paint on canvas, you're participating in an experiment where an independent artist runs her own stack and gets paid instantly from anywhere in the world.
I've been lurking and learning from artists already doing it right on Nostr, IsolaBella is a great example who helped me see how this can work out.
Anyways, I'd love your advice and feedback/critics on the site or on the journey we have in mind! Thanks for reading.
Building small, sovereign things with your family is weirdly cool. We'll keep sharing what works and what breaks as we go.