Wintersday Art Contest winners announced!

The fact that Canadian winners are required to answer a mathematical question to claim their prize suggests to me that ANet itself sees the competition as a game of chance instead of skill

Based on the list of winners, some of the judges are clearly not 'qualified' in the sense that they would have an understanding of what is cheap and mundane and what requires actual talent / effort to accomplish, but ANet has its own priorities. After all, why should it even matter if activating their customer base is what they are looking for? Take my puppet show as an example. I spent one whole night suspending the damn puppets on thin strings because real world objects don't float in the air on faith alone like 3D CG does but since the strings or the rest of the complex rigging structure were not visible in the final image none of the judges even probably noticed the technical feat. Why should the judges need a degree in stop motion animation techniques in order to be qualified to assess the merits of a particular entry? It all boils down the whether one likes the end result or not, and since not all the judges are artists this is what we get.

This would have been my choice.

Congrats to all though.

Dunno and don't care, I designed that especially to match the Capcom ones for the fun of it. But nothing that appear here was taken directly from the game: everything from the game and ArenaNet logo, to the basic shapes of the character selection and VS. screen, to the power and ultra gauges was painstaking re-recreated in Inkscape. The montage, effects and additionnal rendering was done in Paint.NET and Paint Shop Pro X.

Also if I remember the image I submittted was in lower resolution (possibly half or 1/3 the size) due to filesize contraints in email, thus eliminating the pixalisation issue (which mainly comes from the fact that I had hard time finding GW character arts in HD even on conceptart.org and I was not sure if scanning my artbooks would produce a result good enougth + JPEG compression).

I just wonder which ones were stolen artworks. Halloween had....3? How many for this one?

Appears to be... 0.

I think 6 people posted their progress on here, so it's probably safe to say they didn't steal anything.

My friend got HM and I can say with absolute certainty that his wasn't stolen.

The person that made the polar bear pillow posted their progress shots in this thread after somebody took a stab at it.

I can't say with 100% certainty about the rest, but none of them appear stolen to me. The halloween ones were fairly easy to spot and I still have my doubts about one of the pieces that remained, but I figured it was best not to say anything since I couldn't find any proof.

Why be so negative and assume the worst?

Everyone who participated in the Nolani workshop posted progress of their work - that was a large part of the point of the workshop. And I agree, none of the others on there appear to be stolen.

So I'm going to go with "none".

Exactly. Put a girl in a costume showing a lot of skin and the geek judges go "Shhhwwwing!" Sew up some stuffed animals and the girl judges go "ohhhhhhh...". I am not saying they did not take work, but like this post says, you are looking at the biases of a handful of judges. Apparently my entry sucked even though I spent days working on it, and my own personal biases say I kicked butt over half the winners, but I admit that half kicked my butt too.

However, I think I finally have the biases of the judges figured out though so for my next contest I am entering this:

Scantily clad hooker (need a cheap one cuz I am poor), holding a stuffed animal I pick up at the Salvation Army for a dollar or two, with a tattoo stick-on I print up on my computer that says "PlayNC Master Accounts Can Kiss My...", and then put it tastefully on her cheekily exposed rear end. That should cover all the biases and be a sure fire winner!

We all can't be winners now can we....

Not entirely correct. I had one of our top artists sit down with us and take a look at the submissions. During this process different factors were discussed, including technique and creativity. From that, we were then able to produce a shortlist of potential winning that were then put up for a vote, during which everyone at the company was invited to weigh in on. And from that shortlist, the winners were determined. And yes, many artists participated in the voting process. Of course, art is subjective, and as we see in this forum thread, there are a lot of different opinions. Our staff also had differing opinions, which I'm sure are as varied as our players.

Most of that was freakin' amazing! The rest was awesome. lol When's the next art contest? Is it an annual thing or seasonal? I want to start painting now so I'd love to know what the next art contest theme is likely to be.

ahh, I see, I should've asked you for further information, I suppose.

Thanks for clarifying the matter!

I think the only annual art contests are Halloween and Wintersday, so you'll have to wait until Halloween unless there's a new one before then.

If I may, in future, being very optimistic here, cos GW2 may be out the next Wintersday. But it would be a good idea to include these:

1) Limited one entry to containing only one piece of creations per entry (costume). But not limited to how many entry one can enter. Reasoning: to make it easier for your side to judge

2) Progress pictures of said creations.

Anyway. just being overly busybody

Congratulations to all entries! Especially wants to mention Koreena's Plushies and Rudolf's Hat, they are awesome! They look like they are made with passion and love with excellent craftsmanship.


PS:
^^ I think that is a Canadian thing, not an ArenaNet thing, same like people from my side of the world can't enter the contest kinda thing.

thanks...

non textures 1



non textures 2



non textures 3



bubbles non AA



full rigged snowman character




congrats to the winners