See Beeple's $69 million digital artwork for a lot less in new art book 'Everydays: The First 5000 Days'

Remember the digital artwork with a non-fungible token (NFT) that Christie's auction house sold for more than $69 million?

North Fond du Lac native Mike Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple, made that artwork, a digital collage called "Everydays: The First 5000 Days." The NFT means that Christie's winning bidder owns the original, authenticated digital artwork that Winklemann made.

But for the rest of us, there's a new consolation prize: "Beeple: Everydays, the First 5000 Days," a new art book from Abrams' Cernunnos imprint. It's listed at $65, a few orders of magnitude less than the singular NFT.

"Everydays" is a project that Winkelmann began in 2007: He made a new artwork each day, and posted it online. The digital NFT is a collage of all 5,000 images. The new book also collects all 5,000 images, a substantial number of them in sizes larger than the mobile-phone-screen-sized versions many people saw online.

So "Everydays" the book is a visual documentation of Winkelmann's growth as an artist, as he challenged himself first to improve his drawing skills, and then to increase of his master of various digital tools, such as OctaneRender. Many of the early images are simple (Winkelmann titles the 2007-'11 cohort "the REALLY crappy years"), but over time they grow in complexity. Around 2015, he began adding human figures to his fantasy scenes, at first for scale but later sometimes as the primary visual interest. More recent satirical images have a recurring cast including Kim Jong-un, Super Mario, Pikachu, "Star Wars" characters and Buzz Lightyear, whom Winkelmann calls "an analogy for this American overconfidence and stupidity."

If you want to try this at home, Winkelmann described his process this way in an interview incorporated in the book:

"Usually when I sit down, I'll look through pictures on the internet for maybe 10 minutes. I'll look through them very fast, looking for anything that can be that first spark. What is the first minimal viable product that is different from what I've done before, is something I could be interested in, and is something I could spend some time on?"

Winkelmann now lives in South Carolina. He also makes short films and has worked on concert visuals for Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj and other performers.

More: Artist 'Beeple' who sold $69 million digital artwork hails from North Fond du Lac

More: NFTs with Wisconsin connections: Giannis, Tyler Herro and an artist called Beeple

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: See Beeple's $69 million digital artwork for a lot less in a new book