He continued to hone his skills over the following decade, developing one of the most distinctive personal styles found in his generation of Zimbabwean stone sculptors.

Nicholas attended Zvishavani Primary School while his father worked at the nearby King Asbestos Mines.

There, Father Groeber encouraged sculpting and the craft of woodcarving and Nicholas encountered a blend of traditional Christian iconography and tribal African pieces.

Mukomberanwa was heavily influenced by the drawing, patterning, and carving lessons he learned from Groeber and the school's art teacher Cornelius Manguma.

In 1968, Ulli Beier wrote[5] "Mukomberanwa’s sculpture is full of ideas and inventions, he has a great variety of attitudes and expressions and he likes to portray whole clusters of intertwined figures.

In 1969, Frank McEwen's wife Mary (née McFadden) established Vukutu, a sculptural farm near Nyanga, and in 1970 McEwen arranged for Nicholas to have a sabbatical from the police and spend 6 months there working on large pieces of black Penhalonga serpentine that would form part of the Musée Rodin exhibition.

In 1976, Nicholas resigned from the police to become a professional sculptor and by 1977 had a sold-out show of works at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.

In 1978, he arranged to buy a farm near Ruwa from Roy Guthrie, founder of the Chapungu Sculpture Park, and it was there that he settled with his wives (he had married his second wife Betty in 1976) and family.

As his agricultural holdings expanded, he increasingly relied on his family members to complete laborious sculpting tasks, such as polishing.Mukomberanwa's sculptures showed human forms at various levels of abstraction and sometimes depicted animals, birds or spiritual feelings; most were highly polished, although in a few cases he would contrast smooth sections with areas of great roughness.

Celia Winter-Irving said of Nicholas[8] "Unlike many other sculptors, Mukomberanwa speaks from personal experience rather than recounting what he has heard or been told.

The catalogue "Chapungu: Culture and Legend – A Culture in Stone" for the exhibition at Kew Gardens in 2000 depicts Nicholas's sculptures My Experience (Springstone, 1992) on p. 58-59, Man in a Trance (Springstone, 1987) on p. 92-93, Women of Wisdom (Opal stone, 1987) on p. 102-103 and The Corrupting Power of Money (Limestone, 1985) on p. 114-115.

All of his children became sculptors: his sons Anderson, Malachia, Tendai, Lawrence, and Taguma; and his daughters Netsai and Ennica.

[8] Nicholas was also the uncle and teacher of Nesbert Mukomberanwa and mentor to African-American sculptor M. Scott Johnson.