"Creativity Takes Courage" - Painting Competition

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.

- Pablo Picasso

Hello, welcome back to The Art of Caesura!

Thank you so much for joining me for the 10th birthday celebrations of the blog over the past month. Phew! I need a break from all that partying! It's been a Trojan effort to get those posts together - with a few very late nights - but well worth it to commemorate such an achievement. 

I did some brainstorming last year of ways in which I could celebrate the 10th year of the blog, and one of the things that I decided upon was to organize a painting competition. I have never even entered a live painting competition before, much less organized one, so it seemed like a fun challenge to set myself. 

Today, we're going to condense almost 6-months worth of painting competition into one post, and over the next month or so we'll take a deep dive into how I painted my piece. 

I started by spending some time thinking about my goals for the painting competition. Most of the local scene is into gaming (see my extensive coverage of our gaming league before Christmas), and there are only a few of us who are really into the painting aspect of the hobby. So I knew that I wanted this competition to be inclusive, fun and encouraging. 

To that end, I decided that we would all paint the same miniature, (rather than each paint any old mini) and that I would supply the miniatures to make it more inclusive. Everyone chipped in a tenner - and all the money went towards the grand prize. 

From the moment I saw it, I knew exactly which miniature I would use: Commander Sebastian Highway "The Vulture" by Elminiaturista and sculpted by Iván Mata. I loved this mini from the first time I saw it! And I only came to love it more the more I read about it - it was designed to capture "the grit of 80s and 90s action movie antiheroes with the ruthless character of a futuristic universe". 

The official "box art" by Elminiaturista

I thought it would be great for a painting competition because most of us have never painted a bust before, but the larger scale would give us a larger palette to get into the details. I also wanted a model with lots of different textures, skin, metal, cloth, leather. And with the opportunity for something fun (object source lighting (OSL) in this case. 

In August of last year, with the model selected and the rough idea hashed out, I advertised within our little local community. I was thrilled to get much more interest than anticipated - 13 people signed up. And for half of August I just printed Sebastians. I gave people a choice of which configuration they wanted (there are different options for right arms and heads) - and two brave souls even went for double cigars!

I gave the rough end-date of mid-late January (to coincide with the 10th birthday of the blog) and people got cracking! I wanted to give a good amount of time so that no one could use 'not having enough time' as an excuse for not entering; and there are a few of us dads in the group who are very time-poor. 

Well, I say we got cracking, but by November (when I finally got around to starting mine), I think only one or two others had started theirs. 

The submission date rolled around really quickly and everyone was being very cagey with not showing off work-in-progress pics. It was all a lot of fun and built a fun sense of tension. 

Another official box art picture

I had agonized over how the painting competition would be judged. I didn't want to judge it, because I wanted to enter the damn thing! We didn't have any other painters around who weren't also participating. So we weren't going to have a judge. As a second-best option, I opted for a public vote. There were a few potential issues with this (people just getting their friends and family to vote for theirs) but I wanted this to be fun, and didn't want to over-police things. 

By the submission date, 10 of the 13 pieces had been submitted! I was incredulous, I thought we'd be lucky to get 5-8 people completing their entry never mind over three quarters completion! This moment was already a huge victory. It showed me that the painting competition had been fun, inclusive and engaging enough to prompt so many people to actually complete it!

The entries were on display in pride of place in the Guildhall for one week. It took me the full week to finally get in to actually see the entries myself and cast my vote! I was really proud to see them all there, and mine amongst them!

When the big day rolled around, we tore open the ballot box and completed our official count. There were 45 votes - which was great, considering this had only been advertised on our WhatsApp group. 

After a brief speech about the goals of the painting competition and thanking the participants, the attendees and the host, I was excited to announce the winner...

Shane!

Very well deserved! Shane's piece was amazing! He brought a lot of life and depth into the skin tone and his NMM was really nice and smooth, even incorporating the secondary magenta reflection from the bottom right of the picture below. 

I was proud to take second place to such a strong entry, and there was a three-way tie for third place (apologies to Chris, whom I didn't get a photo of)! I have purposefully not spoken much about my piece yet - let's just say we'll be seeing plenty of him over the coming weeks...

Shane got the 130 euro gift certificate for The Guild Hall and immediately cashed it in on Be'lakor - such an awesome painting project! I had little tchotchkes for everyone else - vinyl stickers, grimdark bookmarks, key chains etc. - so everyone was a winner!

After the awards, we had the cake that I'd bought (I'll have to bake one for next year!) and I was in my element, milling around chatting to everyone else about their entries and the competition. It was probably my favourite part of the whole competition!

So, overall, the painting competition went even better than I had hoped! I'm looking forward to hosting it again this year!

I'll see you next week on The Art of Caesura!

Reading: In Ascension - Martin MacInnes

Watching: The Night Manager (season 1)

Next Week:

The Vulture...