NFT artist Itzel Yard breaks out of her comfort zone

Itzel Yard has always been comfortable in her shell.

Until she started breaking into the NFT world, the 32-year-old generative artist, who goes by IX Shells online, said she thrived living in her own world. After losing her father, Vincent Yard, at the age of 14, Yard kept to herself for most of her high school years, preferring to find her community online, even though the other kids teased her for being “quiet ” or “slow,” she told me Fortune.

Her art was, and still is, her greatest refuge.

“It’s a way for me to communicate without having to speak,” she said.

Fast forward to today, and Yard is one of the best-known artists—and one of the best-selling female creators—in the NFT world. In 2021, her piece, Dreaming in the twilight sold for about $2 million at the time to the decentralized autonomous organization, PleasrDAO, with all proceeds benefiting the Tor Project, which develops open source software and advocates for online privacy and anonymity.

This month Yard designed a cover for Fortune’s April/May issue, which will be sold as NFTs in a 24-hour sale starting at 13.00 on 9 April through the NFT Marketplace Foundation.

The digital version of the cover, which features a series of animated shapes rotating clockwise on a beige background, can be summed up in one word: growth. After a tough 2022 in which NFT and crypto prices fell dramatically, the cover image is meant to focus on progress going forward, Yard said.

Cover illustration by Ix Shells

But if you told Yard just three years ago that her art would sell for millions or that she would design the cover of a magazine, she wouldn’t have believed you.

“I still don’t believe it. It’s one of those things that happens once in a lifetime, she said.

In 2020, she lived with her mother and brother in a small house outside of Panama City, relying for a period on the minimum wage income of $600 per month from her mother’s job as a hospital secretary.

Just before he died in a motorcycle accident, the family was going to move to Ecuador for his father’s new job, where he was going to practice as an engineer. But life had other plans, and Yard found herself struggling with depression, she said. There were many days when she would not come out of her room.

Years later, things began to look up when she moved to Canada to pursue a degree in architectural technology and later switched to computer science.

Still, she said most of the time she had to work three jobs, including at one point as a high-rise window cleaner, to make ends meet, as well as send money back to her mother. During her time in Canada, she was inspired by the work of artists such as Tyler Hobbs, Dmitri Cherniak and Jorge Ledezma, and began experimenting with generative art. Most days she spent 16 hours online learning about NFTs and interacting with people in the Web3 community.

She returned to Panama in 2019 without completing her degree after struggling with the effects of an abusive relationship and the strain of being far from home.

Taking time to heal, she threw herself into her art. On long walks to the beach and around Panama City, Yard found her inspiration. In the catharsis of dancing to her favorite experimental and electronic music, she found her rhythm.

Yard drew inspiration for her generative artworks from sounds she recorded or photos she took on her travels. She spent hours on her computer, “hyper-focused,” as she puts it, creating a new piece. It helped drown out her problems.

“It’s all spontaneous,” she said. “It’s me trying to translate my life into another medium.”

In that hyper-attention to detail, she sometimes inserts a poem or an encrypted puzzle into her work in the hope that those who are truly interested will find it and decipher it.

Photo by Val Schnack

As much as it hurts her, Yard admits she has to come out of her shell sometimes. Recently, she has started posting more about herself on social media, doing more interviews and promoting her work more than she ever did before. In the white and male-dominated world of NFT, Yard has also made a point to help other Panamanian and Latino artists, promoting their work and connecting them to her network, as her mentors did for her.

“I feel like I’ve come out of that shell and now I can go and do conferences or go to another country by myself, and those are things I didn’t know I could do until I tried,” she said.

The family fuels her newfound confidence. When her NFT art began to do well, she became the financial caretaker of the family. Now she is pushing her mother to retire from her job at the hospital, although Yard said she stubbornly insists on working a few more years before retiring.

In 2021, Yard took some of the money she had made from her art and bought her family an apartment in the city so they could move out of the small house they lived in and closer to her mother’s job. Art and NFTs have given her the chance to give back to her family, she said, who have done so much to get her to where she is now.

“They’re the reason I balance the world I live in my head with the real thing: traveling, meeting people, going to meetings, taking chances and creating a career,” she said. “I do it for them. If it were up to me, I would probably be lost in an abstract world.”