Competitions

I entered a logo/poster competition this year for something I believe strongly in, a BEER festival.  Competitions can be fun to enter because you get a chance to see how your work stacks up against other artists. But they can also be painful, because you put forth a lot of effort to produce a finished product that could be rejected just because it reminds one of the judges of an old girlfriend or something (not a true example by the way). Of course the people that benefit the most from competition are the people holding them. They receive a wide variety of ideas and styles and can choose the work they like best for much less effort and cost than it would have been to hire someone to do the work in the first place.  But that's ok, the people who submit to competitions are likely like me (they have a day job and do things like this for fun), or they are trying to make a name for themselves and get some experience and some notoriety by winning a competition.

Winning entry

Amazing as it may seem, I did not win this competition. So - I boycotted the event and drank at home. Maybe I'll try again sometime, it depends on what else is going on at the time. I believe the winner of this competition received some printed versions of their winning entry, VIP passes to the event, and a basket full of goodies from many of the microbreweries. My guess is a value of $300 to $500 depending on the goodies. Let me know if you think of the winning poster compared to mine, and don't worry about hurting my feelings.

The tough thing about being a hobby artist is achieving just enough success to keep you optimistic that you could be pretty good at this if you keep trying. In the year 2000, I won a competition for the St. Joseph, Michigan Venetian Festival shirt design. I was not the overall winner, just the adult/commercial artist award winner (the overall winner was some high school kid that year). I felt great about winning the competition and was excited to enter again. I was a little disappointed in the prize for my category though - 1st; the judging committee seemed surprised that I really wanted to collect on the prize, 2nd;the award was 4 T-shirts with my design printed on them, which really meant ironed-on to them. It was a bit of a letdown, but I can understand from their point of view the hassle it must have been to provide 4 specially printed shirts. Like I said though the main thing that experience accomplished was to encourage me to keep at it - I'll break through and be an overall winner someday.

Chinese Famous Architects

Famous Architects in Chinese!

Outhouses by Famous Architects
Chinese cover

Phone Booths by Famous Architects
Chinese cover

Mobile Homes by Famous Architects
Chinese cover

The Chinese versions of the ...by Famous Architects books officially hit the streets over the summer.  For those of you out of the loop, a Chinese University was so impressed with the artwork, content, and popularity of this book series that they decided to reprint them in Mandarin to meet the high demand from their country.  Overall, the format of the books is relatively the same, except for new covers and some new filler pages that use pieces of the artwork from the original books in a new way and that they are written in Chinese! The new filler pages are entertaining in their own right.

Personally, I'm not sure about how well the humor (or should I say attempts at humor) make it through the translation. In fact, I was so interested in what this would be like that I searched the web to see what I could find. Here is some of what I found - keep in mind this is a translation of a translation (English to Chinese, then back to Engrish):

• from: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5031f5f70100p5tk.html
• Bring the house to go Rangers! West mobile home read past lives, all over Europe to see the classic architecture to life.This fun picture book for mobile homes rare in the country.
• Introduction:
  This is a book about "housing will go," A Short History of the building. Mobile home (Mobile Homes) in modern society, also known as "car", "trailer", but in fact, both ancient Egypt movable driven by human pyramids, ancient Greece, Park City, with horse-drawn, or modern by engine-driven car, the protagonist of the book we are. This is a professional architect, cartoonist 史蒂夫谢克尔 "master pieces of architecture" series of picture book three in one.
  Author:
   史蒂夫谢克尔 born in 1967, Columbus, Indiana, USA, has a dual career as an architect and cartoonist. Shekel like a fun easy way to spread to the public construction of knowledge, through his unique perspective on the master design techniques, and to study how the masters of these techniques applied to mobile homes, phone booths, and outdoor toilets on these architectural sketches of.
  Recommended artists:
  Now hopefully it's not just me that thinks something might be lost in the translation. But I don't really mind, I likely will not meet many of the Chinese people who may have read these books and were disappointed because they didn't make sense to them.
  
  
  
  This is Steve Shekel signing out