The goal of this contest was to draw a skate spot taken from the levels of THPG. The entries were judged according to both artistic style and how well they fit the criteria of the contest. See the submitted pieces and the reasoning behind their placement below.
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Winners:
3rd place goes to:
Flint!
This was a particularly hard one to decide. Flint has always paid a lot of attention to detail in his artwork. This remains true with this piece. Flint does a good job of detailing the walls, ledge, and what you can see of the quarterpipe in this piece. Additionally, Flint has thrown his own personal touch on the wall above the ledge: if you might have wondered who drew this picture, all you have to do is take a glimpse of the graffiti dollar sign and you probably have a good idea already. Looks like a building straight out of inner-city Philly. In fact, that's exactly what it is: a building. With the focus on the piece being the building, that's the skate spot Flint chose to draw. As a skate spot, what can you do? Short grinds, maybe a few lip tricks... and then move on. Yes, the picture does retain the quarterpipe, but only barely. Then, everything else is just squashed out of focus on the left. It basically appears to be a jumble of colors. Artistically, it's quite a nice piece. It's not the most interesting, though.
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2nd place goes to:
Insomniac!
First of all, I'd like to mention that I'm very glad that Insomniac decided to work on his original piece a bit instead of just being done with it. The old piece was alright. Nothing too interesting, nothing too creative. Even when being less sketchy, I was having some issues with perspective on his older piece. This final piece is not just a few small edits and modifications. It's not just touching the piece up in a few places. This is a complete overhaul on the original. Same pool/fountain/statue area in the D.C. National Mall. By redrawing the spot, Insomniac put a lot of character into the piece. It just seems like a classic skate scene: some skater getting ready to drop into a pool that's probably not supposed to be skated in, tricking off a statue that's probably not supposed to be tricked off of. I'm not going to say this piece is perfect, however. While the sketchiness of the piece does give it its unique character, there are some problems with spatial reasoning (what exactly is going on with the statue?) and some perspective issues. The lack of colors kind of detracts from the piece as well: while shading is decent for the most part, perhaps a bit of color would brighen the picture up a bit.
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1st place goes to:
Sigma! Congratulations!
This piece is the most interesting and attention-grabbing piece of the bunch. Sigma brings to us an overhead view of the area outside of D.C.'s Air and Space Museum. Like Flint, Sigma paid close attention to detail on this piece. You can really see the textures on the steps from the building across and on the median. Additionally, the perspective of this piece is as if you had viewed the skate spot through a camera. It's almost like you're about to film some crazy tricks off of the shuttle and maybe some tech tricks on the steps to make a cool video part. What's important in this regard, though, is that with the fish-eye lens, the aspects of the surrounding enviromnet follow how they actually would when looking through that camera, so not only did Sigma provide a unique perspective, but he did so accurately. What really makes this piece stand out artistically is the accuracy of perspective and spatial reasoning not seen to such a degree in other pieces. Keeping this in mind, though, Sigma managed to put all of this environment in a small space, but not without making it look quite crowded. There's a lot going on in this picture. Also, in the same manner as in Insomniac's piece, even with the shades of brown present, the piece looks a little bit dull with its heavy focus on gray and brown. Even still, I feel that Sigma produced the best piece for this contest both artistically, and with regard to the ideas of the contest. Congrats!
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For those of you that did not make the top 3 and are wondering why, here are my reasons:
taybo
The skate spot you picked is a cool one, I'll give you that. Very classic skate environment. My main problem is the sketchiness of it. It doesn't really make sense in a lot of places. I could have probably figured out the spot you were depicting based on general patterns, but to be honest, it doesn't really look like it much. The gray areas don't really look like a ramp much, and it's kind of hard to tell where the ramp might be in relation to that median section. It's also hard to tell where the area outside of the ramps are in relation to the ramps. It also looks as if you're looking at it from different perspectives based on what part of the picture you're looking at. Definitely a good effort, but in the end, this piece just doesn't make it.
Coolmonk
Not a bad piece of art, but not a very good depiction of your chosen skate spot. Yes, I can easily tell how you're looking at the fountain just based on the objects present, but this piece does a bad job of depicting a three-dimensional skate spot. The base of the structure doesn't look like a quarterpipe, and the window through which the water falls doesn't look much like, well, a waterfall. It's a very two-dimensional drawing as it is. Perhaps this could have been helped some given some more surroundings? You mentioned that you didn't have enough colors to draw any surroundings, resulting in empty space. Perhaps that's just an inefficient use of resources.
Sockhead
This is a good piece. In fact, the reason that I was saying that it was hard to choose Flint's piece for 3rd place was because it was competing with this one. Both pieces were drawn as if they had come directly out of the game: Flint drew his piece from a screenshot he had, maintaining that same angle, and I'm not sure if you had a point of reference for this one, but for the most part, this spot appears as it does in the game. As it ends up, this is the same basic spot that Sigma drew, only less interesting. It was competing for 3rd place, but in the end, Flint's piece won due to taking that those last artistic and creative steps.
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Thank you all very much for participating in this contest! I definitely enjoyed hosting it. If you have any feedback for me, please feel free to post in this thread or send me a message. I'd love to do more of these contests if they continue to have support from you guys!
Artist
NELLY!
Da Masterz of Disaster
