Art Contests – Oh My
For a period of time, I was ever interested in art contests. I enjoyed participating in a few real world ones early on, but I’ve largely bowed out of the process. Partially this is because so many contests these days, particularly the ones you find online, are simply an attempt to grab the rights to as many images as possible. Some refer to these as library-building contests. Spending the time to read pages of contest rules to figure out if they are legitimate just doesn’t seem worth the time.
Perhaps I’m also simply not competitive enough to participate in contests? Additionally so for those that are essentially popularity contests where one has to beg for votes. The winners of those contests are nor necessarily the best images so much as the best marketers. Or at least they are the most persistent networkers.
Still, when I discovered that Fine Art America was in the midst of a big photo contest, I had to take a look. I discovered, that a handful of winners for this contest will have their work and name appear in a national TV ad campaign. And when I saw that part, I had to bite even though I was not sure that I personally had the competitive spirit to finish round one. That first round, after all, is the very popularity contest I mentioned above. I need to get 250 votes on one of my three entries by June 30th in order to reach the actual juried competition.
So far, I’ve managed to get one of my three entries up to over 100 votes. Tantalizing much further than I ever expected, but still far short of the 250 needed within the next week to get to the second round.
The funny thing is, though, that I had no idea how encouraging this contest would be in the grand scheme of things. I’ve lost track of how many times friends and followers of my work shared my vote begging messages and added incredibly nice comments about both my work and me as a person while asking their friends to vote for me. Getting to read those kind comments was worth entering even if I don’t make it to the next round.
That said, I figured I would make one final push to see if I can get over that hurdle with your help. The exposure in an ad campaign could prove valuable and I won’t get to test that if I don’t at least pass the first hurdle in this photo contest. So, if you don’t mind, I’d greatly appreciate if you’d take a second to click through and vote for my entry. And I’d be even more grateful if you shared this request with your friends and family. That’s the only way I can get the rest of the votes necessary.
My entry in the Fine Art America photo contest is here.
Thanks in advance to each and every one of you who takes up the torch to help me. And thanks to those who already got me this far! No matter the outcome of this contest, I am happy to be surrounded by so many supportive people!