Clay Lips — A Positivity Project
Clay Lips, kissable clay characters, is an NFT project designed and implemented by a husband and wife team from South Korea. Kyle is an educator and his wife is a talented artist who works in clay and paint media. This is truly a family project as their two children are also involved. Their son helps with video editing and animation, and their daughter with sculpting and art. Kyle became involved with Cardano through a friend, who nagged him until he opened a wallet. Then he found the community and, like the rest of us, was hooked on the potential of using Cardano to build a better world. It should be noted that this project is not affiliated in any way with Clay Nation.
The name springs from the art, which is bright and high quality. Each character is lovingly designed in detail with a variety of attributes and accessories. The detail continues into the personality of each character. Thoughtfully created in multiple ethnicities and from diverse geographic locations, each character has a background. Those are also diverse and designed to appeal to multiple personality types. The family actually sat down at the kitchen table and worked together to create these biographies.
While Kyle was raised in the US, he has been an educator in South Korea for over a decade. Because of the academic pressures and a cultural stigma about mental health issues, South Korea has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. As an educator, Kyle wanted to create a project that promotes mental wellness among youth. He understands that dealing with mental health issues requires a focus on both access and an effort to destigmatize mental illness. He struggled a bit himself when he was in college. He vividly remembers his friends telling him he didn’t need to reach out, everyone goes through that etc. Of course a lot has changed since then, but Kyle feels that more needs to be done to promote openness and access in regard to mental health issues.
The first, fully minted, series consists of all female characters who are portrayed as “just regular people like you and me. They have jobs and relationships and they have good days and not-so-good days”. The second series of NFT characters is coming soon and will be Clay Lips Dudes. The team purchased additional equipment with the proceeds from the first mint and are excited to show off the improvements in the next.
The purpose of these characters is to promote positive messages and techniques that promote mental wellness. The long-term goal is to create a series of books and videos, all curated by mental health professionals with the intent of helping people cope with the information overload that hits us all of our waking hours. The first series of books will target an elementary school age audience with age-appropriate messaging regarding positive coping techniques. This will be reviewed by mental health professionals. A later series will focus on a more adolescent audience. Other things under consideration include working with an architect to support underprivileged children in the US and even a mental health conference at the end of this year. It’s still early days for all of that and the project is very fluid and malleable. The team is willing to try new things and can be reached on Twitter or Discord if you would like to learn more.
