Sam Spratt is a New York based artist, working in Manhattan, whose pursuit is to make human art with human values about the stumbles, realizations, and fight to engage in a shared reality.^[1]

Early Career

Sam Spratt, born on August 30, 1988, was raised in Brooklyn, New York. Sam was interested in drawings and art since his childhood. His early ventures into the arts were confined to doodles in his notebooks. With that interest, he pursued his career by attending the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010 and graduated with a BFA(Bachelor of Fine Arts) in illustration.^[2]

Sam says that,^[4]

I was mostly trained in oils. So we learned very old school techniques from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods. It was very messy and stained everything I owned.

Since graduating from college in July, Sam worked as a staff illustrator and has done hundreds pieces for Gawker Media as well as Gizmodo; three print covers for Game Informer; and a gigantic tour bus for two renowned photographers.^[3]

Sam reveals his career path towards art, saying,^[8]

I don’t wanna say I had no interest in art, I doodled robots in the margins of my notebooks and liked building houses in The Sims, but I’m one hundred percent confident I would never have been an artist if I hadn’t dated a girl in high school who wanted to become a fashion designer. I was a pretty shitty high school student, bad grades, no hobbies, didn’t have any grand aspirations for art, but took a required course my last semester senior year, applied to one art school and nothing else, miraculously got in, and ended up following her to Savannah College of Art and Design.
When I got to college that relationship had already ended, so I had a little fish-out-of-water moment and ended up in art school with no real good reason for being there. But that’s just kinda how life works. Fortunately, I found an odd sense of accomplishment getting grades for drawings of vases and faces versus math or whatever. I kinda dove in on that, became a little obsessed with it, and pretty much from the moment I started art school to the end, I was drawing or painting morning to night every single day. When I left school, I kept that going. Less sleep, more art.
Honestly, I didn’t really even know what you did with drawing. When I showed up to art school, my first day, we learned how to draw still lifes, which is when you have a bunch of objects in front of you and you draw them. I didn’t even know that was a thing that people did in art, I was going in with a pretty blank mind. I didn’t know what kind of jobs you could get. I didn’t know what path you could pursue.
Even when I graduated, my initial pull was editorial stuff, maybe caricatures for The New Yorker. That’s what I thought would be my path, but it just kind of branched in that natural, fun way that things tend to.

Art Career

Sam Spratt is an illustrator, who is renowned for his detailed and real-looking portraits of various politicians and celebrities. His medium of painting varies through acrylics, oil painting and digital tablet painting.

Sam uses a classic oil technique on computer tablets, for digital painting that resembles the traditional painting.

It was sort of brought on to us that you could draw digitally with these tablets. It really struck a chord with me. The process is very similar to the traditional painting but you can make changes easier and do it in this kind of synthetic and clean environment.^[4]

• On December 7, 2020, he released a cinematic trailer, revealing the title, release date, track list, and the cover art, designed by Sam Spratt. The songs She Knows This and Heaven on Earth were released as promotional singles, with accompanying two part music videos.
• He has worked with celebrities, publications, and corporations worldwide. His work and clients range from creative direction for Netflix and The Game Awards, working with Rockstar Games on Red Dead Redemption 2.
• Magazine covers and editorial illustrations for Game Informer, Variety, Rolling Stone, Der Spiegel, The Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal.
• Promotional and advertising imagery for The Clios, Streeteasy, Budweiser, Progressive, National Geographic, Angry Birds, FX Network, Cinemax, Bioware, Gearbox Software, and Tomb Raider, conceptual art for the game industry.
• Cover art and branding for the music industry with music labels such as Universal, Warner, EMI, Def Jam, album art for Kid Cudi, Janelle Monáe, All Time Low, Ty Dolla Sign, Donald Glover, and Logic album cover
• Movie posters for Oscar and Sundance winning films, Theatre posters for Tony-award winning plays such as A Long Day's Journey Into Night and All The Way.
• Personally commissioned artwork and private portraiture for celebrities, athletes, and Fortune 500 CEOs.
• Medical illustrations for The American Association of Cancer Research, with tour bus wraps, stage design, merchandise, book covers, websites, logos, advertising concepts, and everything in between.
• His work has been featured on PBS, Yahoo, Imagine FX, Complex, Forbes, NME, Pitchfork, Maxim, The Daily Dot and MTV.
• Sam's art works while he was based in a Brooklyn studio were:

New year- Self Portrait
Portrait painting of Ed Maximus- Color
RIP Great Uncle Laurence- Oil on Panel
Kim Jong-II- Personal Work
The Flash Bus- Illustration
Terra- Portrait Painting
An Apology- Digital Portrait Painting
RIP Amy Winehouse- Digital Critique
Wrong Turn- future Self-Portrait Painting

His technique is built off of classical oil-painting training, translated to the fast-paced digital world.
^[7][9]

NFT and CryptoArt

• In October 2021, after nearly a year of preparation, Spratt unveiled his first NFTs; a series of digital paintings paired with psalms called Luci. Released episodically, they tell the dystopian story of a primate of the same name.
• The release of the first six digital paintings, spread across three chapters of Luci, generated sales of nearly $1 million. The seventh work in the series was sold by Christie’s in June 2022. It was offered as lot number one in an online sale of NFTs to benefit the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies(MAPS). It achieved $252,000, more than three times its low estimate. The 27-lot sale in total raised over $1.5 million for charity.

• Skulls of Luci [LUCI], is an NFT collection, which each of them are a gift to the collectors, collaborators and each individual, who placed an offer on the genesis series- LUCI Chapter 1.

According to Spratt, the digital paintings in Luci act as a bridge between the world of NFTs and physical fine art. This echoes his own artistic journey, having started out as a classically-trained oil painter.

I have a traditional background and love the texture, the feel, all of the uniqueness that makes an oil painting. I was eventually drawn to digital art because you could feel that these things are just going to bleed into each other.

^[5]

• One of the Sam Spratt's collections- IOU ONE EDITION OF 256 was sold to Medici Ventures, where, Sam speaks about IOU on #MediciMinutes courtesy of @CozomoMedici.^[12]

IOU ONE EDITION OF 256. This is a reservation. The only one. Every other will either be a chosen champion or a clamor up the tree.

^[11]

Please welcome Player 1: @ptmNFT
See you in August for LUCI: Chapter 5. The largest chapter of Luci yet: a system which connects my 1/1s, story, Skulls, Council, and now: Players together into an intricately designed yet simple game. Now, Who will be the other 255 Players?

• SnowFro traded a punk and two squiggles (including a fuzzy) for a Sam Spratt Skull- Blood In The Aqueduct, traded from Rhynotic to ArtOnBlockchain, i.e., 1 Skull of Luci for Cryptopunk #2783 + Chromie Squiggle #9791 + Chromie Squiggle #9803, on July 13, 2023, making SnowFro 44th member of Skulls of Luci.

Last summer, I bought two extra Skulls of Luci for 10.3e and 12.3e ($11.7k & $14.1k at the time) because of my conviction in @SamSpratt. Excited to trade one of them after a year with @ArtOnBlockchain. 70e / $135k trade value but the culture is priceless

^[13]

Achievements and Awards

Sam Spratt has won the award from Adobe, the Society of Illustrators, and American Illustration.
He has been commissioned by Razer to work on some art, and drawn Adam Frucci riding a space raptor.^[6]

In 2019, in honor of the 60th anniversary of the day of advertising, Sam's work was placed on the largest billboard in the United States (Times Square, New York). His works are worth approximately $5,000 to $60,000, and his total net worth is estimated at more than $6 million.^[10]

LUCI from the collection also graced Times Square in New York.