Posts with tag fanart

In the last year, I have noticed that Blizzard has been making more of an effort to reach out to its community. When I say community, I mean the artists, the writers, the singers, bloggers, theorycrafters, and everything in between.

From having the three major franchises join Twitter, to the Battlecry Mosaic, to contests galore -- tell me, what does this mean to you? Have you participated in any of these contests or events? I myself actually entered the Fan Art Calendar contest just last night, and while I'm hardly expecting to win, it was not only a fun project to work on but it made me realize that Blizzard has at least a genuine-looking interest in its artistic fanbase.

Are you guys enjoying the contests? Or do you believe it's all a big corporate sham to make Blizzard seem all moonbeams and kittens?

Discuss amongst yourselves!

Some of the coolest contests happen in the EU, and unfortunately, sometimes completely under our radar. World of Warcraft in Europe recently announced the winners of a contest held between November 23 and December 6, 2009 (that's a period of two weeks, so even the folks in Europe might've missed out on it) which asked folks to design their own World of Warcraft trading card. We told you the coolest contests happen in the EU.

Winners were announced last December 18, 2009, with Blizzard apparently selecting the best entries according to language. Five winners were selected, with J. Hoermandinger winning the top prize for English submissions with the Boo'Yah "Brickhead" card; D. Klenk was the German winner with Shilanya; S. Mariez won the French top prize with Perséphia Tristombe; A. Fuentes Garcia was the Spanish winner with Nairies; and A. Kirsanova won the Russian prize with a thankfully nameless but awesome-looking card (Cyrillic would be a little troublesome to jot down here).

The contest awarded a veritable Upper Deck treasure trove that included a Death Knight deluxe starter kit, a World of Warcraft miniatures game starter kit and booster pack, and the ScourgeWar epic collection which has the Tiny loot card. The loot card enables Horde characters to mount a miniature raptor and Alliance characters to ride a miniature pony to move at unmounted speed. Congratulations to the all the winners! For those of you who missed out on the fun, you can always make your own TCG cards by downloading their Horde or Alliance templates. Enjoy!

You probably remember that a few weeks ago, WoW Insider ran a fan art contest with some pretty sweet SteelSeries items as prizes. We said we were going to show off the winners, and we will! We wanted to contact the winners before we told you who they were, and these things take awhile sometimes. We've now spoken to every single one of them, and it's time to show things off!

Our winners are...

• Grand Prize: Raymond Liang
• First Prize: Shawn Gaston
• Second Prize: Russ Harp
• Third Prize: Connor Murphy

Remember, winners were chosen by the editorial staff, taking the theme of the contest into consideration along with the scoring system detailed in the official rules. You can check out all of the winners and submissions in the gallery below.

It's Saturday afternoon! What are you doing? I have no idea! I know what you should be doing, though. You should be finishing up your submissions to our Fan Art Contest! You only have a couple of days left, the contest ends the evening of April 20th.

Again, submissions are judged based on artistic skill, presentation, and creativity. Creativity is weighed much more heavily than the two. If you can make us smile with a crayon doodle, you probably still have a chance to win. Plus, it'll get you featured on our front page even if you don't win, so that's pretty cool. Right?

For the full rules and all of that, head on over to the official contest page. Good luck!

Blogger DeSlisser was in Paris recently when he came upon a strange sight in a store: A comic book called "WaoW" that covered the journey of a newb in the world of "Razemoth" as he looks for a dungeon to level in. It's very definitely suppose to be Azeroth, and even the dungeon he eventually finds is clearly the Deadmines. The comic book, however, does not seem to be an official Blizzard product.

Of course, we've seen pirated Warcraft items before, but this would be the first foray I've heard into the world of pirate comics. The phenomenon is widespread enough in Japan that it has its own convention simply for the selling of these books that, according to many, violate Intellectual Property rights.

So perhaps Blizzard is getting to that point too. Will they crack down on comic books like "WaoW?" Should they? After all, they don't crack down on WoW fanart. But then again, most WoW fanartists don't try to sell their work in bulk either.

[via Tobold]

You know, I've always wanted a bit more drawing talent, but never more so than right now, as Blizzard has just announced a new fanart contest. They're looking for the best European fanart of Arthas wielding Frostmourne.

The entries will be judged by a panel of developers, and if you win, you'll not only receive one of Epic Weapons' Frostmourne Replicas, but a guaranteed slot in the upcoming beta for WoTLK. 2nd and 3rd place runners up will also receive a slot in the beta.

It should be noted that the contest is currently being announced on the European site, and the rules state that the contest is open only to residents of France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Luxemburg, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, or Ireland. There doesn't appear to be any word yet on whether we'll get an American version of the contest, but here's hoping we see that soon. It seems likely that Blizzard had to create two seperate contests because of legal requirements, and is still working on getting the US version up.

Check out Blizzard's official announcement here and the official rules here.

EDIT: The American version of this contest can be found here.

[Thanks to all our tipsters for sending this in!]

I was looking through the Blizzard fan art pages recently, with the thought in my mind that I could do a "Best of Blizzard Fan Art" feature for our dear WoW Insider readers, when I found that selecting the "best" was extremely difficult. I kept copying so many pictures into my own "best of" folder that I began to feel like I might as well just link you all to the entire fan art site and call it a day. Most of it is really very fun to look at many many times.

So today I went back determined to try again and found that they had redesigned the entire site. It loads much faster, and presents the art to you in a much smoother interface. You can see many more thumbnails per page, and change the size of the thumnails depending on how many you want to see. Once you click on a picture, you can then easily scroll through from one to another very quickly, without having to wait for the entire page to reload again and again. Also, they managed to provide a nice fade effect, so that the transition between pictures is smooth. The only downside is that you can no longer link to a single piece of art.

Oh -- and also, you can no longer just click and download each picture to your own computer. I'm sure there must be a way (short of taking a screenshot), but it's beyond me. I'll take it as a sign from heaven, since I can no longer conveniently build my "Best of" folder, that the "Best of Blizzard Fan Art" site is the whole Blizzard fan art site itself. Now, with the tediousness of complicated page-loading removed, you may find browsing through the artwork gives you a whole new experience.

New fan art submissions have been added to the Blizzard fan art page. The two images thumbnailed here are "Cold Battle", submitted by Can Soner (Pskocan), and "I was waiting for you", submitted by Sara Forlenza (Marea). If you have artwork that you would like to enter to be shown in their gallery, read the rules here.

Please be sure that you are entering your own works, as there have been reports of plagiarism in artwork submissions. Dalayur, previously of Forte, had his artwork submitted by someone else last week, but many of us had already seen his artistic endeavors and notified Blizzard of the error. This is actually the second time this has happened to Dalayur, but Blizzard has given proper credit to him for this submission.

We have our winners in the penultimate Countdown to Burning Crusade Fan art contest. Matthew Renner is going to receive the Sennheiser PC 160 noise-cancelling headset and a More Dots! t-shirt for his entry above (right-click for a high-res version) of his main character Sheltem who, "having specced 40 arcane 11 fire, procs enough ignites to know the true meaning of 'more dots.'" Our fan art runner-up, who will be rewarded with a More Dots! t-shirt, is Simon Sørensen for his rendition of a blood elf. Check out Simon's artwork after the jump, grats to both of our winners, and thanks to everyone who participated in the fan art contest. Stay tuned for our machinima contest winners!

You will be able to participate in most of the Countdown to BC contests each day as they're announced, but you'll have to work a little harder to take home any of the three grand prizes. We're laying out the rules for the final three contests here so you can get your creativity on for a chance to win a Logitech G15 keyboard and a Jinx World of Warcraft hoodie, a Sennheiser PC 160 headset and mic set and a More Dots! t-shirt, or a Belkin N52 gamepad and a Green Linen t-shirt. Read on for the skinny on the three grand prize contests and get details on how to enter.

Starting July 31st at midnight, Blizzard will begin accepting art submissions for their 2006 art contest.  They accept 2d or 3d artwork, from amateurs or professionals, in four categories: Diablo art, Cinematics art, Starcraft art, and Warcraft art.  The four grand prize winners will walk away with loot worth over $10,000 - including a trip for two to Los Angeles for lunch or dinner with the Blizzard art team.  So if you're the creative type, now's the time to get to work!

Blizzard Europe has posted an interview with fan artist Romain de Santi, whose work has been featured in both the US and EU art galleries.  It's an interesting interview that gives some insight about how de Santi creates his illustrations.  To hopeful artists, he offers this advice: Always sacrifice a gnome before beginning work. More seriously, fan-art remains a form of drawing and apart from applying yourself and working hard, there are no miracle recipes for success. You must observe a lot, be curious and motivated.

[Fan art by Romain de Santi]

Acaciaizm.com has a new gallery of character portraits commissioned by players on EU-Daggerspine and beautifully brought to life by artist Dalayur. The fanart on the official site is also breathtaking at times; the amount of talent in the WoW community never fails to amaze me.

What's particularly interesting about Dalayur's work is that he charges in-game gold for it; the topic of virtual currency for real assets is hotly debated by theorists and academics, and in this case the result is a real picture of a virtual character, complicating the issue even more!

Just when you thought we couldn't say any more about Valentine's Day: this art collection by Alexandria Neonakis includes two gorgeous WoWentine's cards ("Frost Shock" and "Molten Core"). She's also got a few other WoW pieces up; well worth checking out.

We're not quite sure if "Frost Shocking" someone's love is a good or bad thing, mind.

[Via Joystiq]