As someone interested in our art challenge, please take the time to read the guidelines and general rules below. Alphabeastiary is an advanced art challenge. While we encourage people to do the challenge on their own, we will only post pictures of those we feel are of an excellent quality in terms of skill and/or creativity. If you're unsure if you're good enough, compare your art to what has been posted so far. If we reject you we reserve the right to not critique your art.
To Join
To join our blog you must first send an e-mail with samples of your art portfolio to alphabeastiary@gmail.com. A few good, recent examples will do, but along with them you may also include your DeviantArt/website/etc.
EDIT I, Toby, would greatly, GREATLY appreciate if you would attach at least 4 or more images of your best work to your email instead of only linking to your DA pages. I know it's more convenient that way, but I check applications often at work, when I'm not signed into DA, and I am constantly bombed by trojan attacks from their ads. It will just make my life better, and things faster for you. But feel free to link to your entire DeviantArt just in case, if I need to look at more pictures I'll go to it after work. Thanks!
Your pictures don't all have to be of mythical creatures, but a nice balance of pictures will help, from animals to humans, since we will have challenges for both. If accepted, we will send you a congratulatory e-mail and post your submissions when you send them in. If your quality of artwork starts to slip below what we feel is acceptable we will get in touch with you about it. If we reject you we will also notify you. If we do reject you, feel free to do the challenge on your own.
If you are unsure if you are up to our standards, compare your art to what has been submitted so far, that is your best way to gauge this.
Schedule
A new beast will be given every two weeks, on Sundays. Feel free to submit your beast at any time in those two weeks. We will post entries as soon as they are sent to us and when we have time to put them up. The posts will go up one entry at a time, labeled with the artist's name and you may give us one website of yours with each submission to link on the entry, EG: your website, your DeviantArt, your blog, etc.
Entries for the highlight are due 11:59 PST the Saturday before. At the end of the two weeks, when we post the next challenge entry, we will post what we felt was the most interesting submission! A nice little highlight for you and your hardwork.
If you join after a certain challenge is completed, or couldn't submit during the two weeks of a challenge, you can still submit for past challenges and we will post them. You also do not have to do every challenge, but we encourage you to try!
Rules
- Feel free to do your own interpretation of the challenge beast, be it realistic paintings to cartoons, to minimalist to Japanese woodblock print to yarn sculpture. However, please keep the recognizable aspects of the beast intact. We want to be able to tell what it is. If we give you a Minotaur make sure it has minotaur traits. We will accept any style as long as it's recognizable. For instance, Kasey has a more storybook/painterly style while Toby has a spastic cartoony style. We are not expecting huge, painted, realisitc pieces from everyone.
- Fully rendered images (color or not) are highly encouraged. Be as creative as you can with each beast. Remember, it can be as modern or as traditional in interpretation as you want it to be.
- Sketches are acceptable if they are well scanned, cleaned up, on nice paper, and very well-done, but we prefer cleaned-up, finished pieces. We would prefer if all submitted work looks as professional as possible.
- Please no porn. Nudity is allowed as most of the monsters obviously don’t wear pants but please keep it tasteful. (Kids should be able to enjoy our blog too).
- No fanart! We don't what interpretations of other people's interpretations. Please make your own.
- We will provide information about each beast but feel free to look up more on your own. Part of the fun is learning about new monsters from different lands that you might not know about. The more you know the more you can add to your image.
- When submitting your entries, please keep your pictures within a 1,000 - 2,000 px limit in width and height, depending on if your image is horizaontal or vertical, or at least under 2MBs in memory size. For one, pictures look so much better when they're a viewable size on most monitors, and for two, we only have so much space. Mostly it's the space.
- Please comment as often as you can to encourage our lovely artists. If you feel a person's submission needs some critique make sure it is actual critique that is helpful, and doesn't have hurtful statements saying they don't belong on this blog. If you have a problem with anything on the blog, from quality of artist to how we do something, you can e-mail us.
Some good examples to look at for inspiration:
http://www.beastsbook.blogspot.com/
http://www.godchecker.com/
http://www.obakemono.com/list.php
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