I’d forgotten to mention that the group Brodents wound up competing in another paintathon hosted by Lightbox Expo!! We thankfully made it into the top 10, which was honestly a feat considering that there were over 80 submissions. The judges seemed a bit confused by our piece because of the atmospheric look of Santa. One of the judges actually thought that he was dead and poor Grace was losing her mind over that. “OH GOOD. I killed Santa!”
Admittedly we were a bit disappointed that we didn’t get a paintover by Nathan Fowkes the way we did last year, but we were also told by the staff that we shouldn’t expect big artists like that to always be on the judge panel. They like to use guest artists for the Paintathons and sometimes people without as much industry experience were more interesting to budding artists. I’m not sure if I personally agree with this sentiment, because I think you run into strange issues when the actual people competing have more professional experience as artists than some of the panelists.
Then again, what do I know. It sounds like lots of places are starting to undervalue the necessity of professional artists, if Folio Society firing off all of their ADs wasn’t any indication. It’s a shame really.
I hope that the art world comes to it’s senses soon.
