The Second Art Contest: 25th Anniversary
So after the success of the first contest, I got A LOT of requests for another one and some artist contacted me and told me they didn’t know about the first one but after seeing the results, they want to participate in the next. I had a great time so I decided to go much, much bigger. And this is where the things got really interesting
Rules & Concept
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Celebrations was announced as a 25th anniversary set. I found it pretty amazing, a reprint of the cards that I used to collect? the Pikachu cool stamp? I thought the concept was rad so I adapted it to my own community sensibilities.
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I changed the Pikachu stamp for a Psyduck stamp, with the 2 & 5 numbers inside his peak. It had to be simple and recognizable. It took some time but with the help of a member of my community, this was the result.
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This time the artists could use anything they wanted. From traditional art to digital, even clay, paper or whatever material they wanted, as long as it was not licenced (so for example, a photograph of a Funko Pop was not eligible, BUT if they created the figure even with an original 3D model with a printer, it was fine)
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They could choose between every official pokemon in existence, so more than 850+ options, including forms (as Galar or Kanto variants) or non-official creatures from the games but available in the anime or manga, as the Crystal Onix. The only excluded forms were megaevolutions, dynamax, gigantamax OR shinies, with the exception of the red shining gyarados as this is a story-related creature into the canon of the games.
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From the announcement to the final day to send the drawings, they had 12 days. I ended up receiving almost 90 pictures (too bad some of them was not eligible as did not follow the rules and selecting them wouldn’t be fair for the rest of the artists)
Participants
As before, I’m not going to upload every picture here but you can check all of them in this gallery. This is a few selections of some of the drawings. Id love to know your favourites if you have some time to check all of them!
Jury Members
This time, I wanted to do something even better, more international. Some of the people I contacted didn’t reply, unfortunately, but I had 10 amazing jury members. Here is the full list
- Gabi Rodea & Lilly-Chan: winners of the official Art Academy contest organized by the Pokémon Company. Gabi is working now for Disney, and Lilly it’s still working as an illustrator.
- Conrad Roset, creator of GRIS, the acclaimed video game from Nomada Studio and Devolver Digital, winner of the Annie and BAFTA for best animation
- Toni Infante, regular illustrator for Marvel, DC and GTM Magazine
- Sergio González, director of the Conexión Pokémon podcast and journalist
- Lyra-Gamer, youtuber, voice actress and illustrator
- Blessur, Pokémon VCG player and streamer
- Sekiam, winner of multiple competitive Pokémon tournaments and streamer
- Dr. Lava’s Lost Pokemon, Pokémon research and documentation expert and regular contributor to Did You Know Gaming?
- Gomi Kuzu Tarou, artist
(Examples of Toni’s art)
(Gabi & Lilly’s cards)
All of them send me videos or documents with their choices. and it surprised me a lot to see Gomi and Gabi take it really seriously! (Lilly was with me live streaming to pick her choices)
Winners
This time, there was five winners, but six cards produced (18 copies of each, again; and the same distribution as the first contest)
- Two audience awards, voted by the community (one of them in two versions: regular and alternative full art)
- One Jury Award
- One winner from Gabi
- One winner from Lilly
(This was a secret for both of them and also the audience! it was a surprise, so they didn’t have extra pressure for selecting one or another!)
BUT the art the community sent was so unreal, amazing and with a lot of variety that I decided to go a little crazy and I selected a mixture of the most voted artworks and my favourites to do a subset of monthly promos, similar to the Final Fantasy TCG ones. These were printed without being numbered (still the copies were limited, due to budget), and there are 13 in total. Yes, I know a year has twelve months lol but for February (the birth of Mewtwo) I decided to do a double promo! (pics a little later!)
Fun fact, all the attacks, numbers, pokedex description and everything is based on the first pokemon card TPCi have translated into spanish. So Charizard has his Base Set stuff, and the same for the rest. This also applies to the promos. This was part of the anniversary dna that I wanted to preserve from the Celebrations concept!
Winners Gallery
From left to right: Grand Prize (both Audience & Jury Winner), 2nd Jury Prize, 2nd Audience Award
Gabi’s Winner and his tweet about it
Lilly’s Winner and her tweet about it
The extra winner card, a full alt-art that I just couldnt resist to print due to the time, dedication and overall amazing work the artist did. I swear, in person it looks even better
Original photo / Card
Comparison to Komiya’s Scream Promo (I recreated all the text, layout and everything to be as similar as possible to the original)
Some behind the scene pictures
Promos Gallery
(Right mouse click for bigger images!)
Final words
Again, thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell this story! and to Scott for inviting me to this amazing forum. Early 2022, with the announcement of the Gen 9 and the Hisuian forms from Pokemon Legends Arceus I created my third and last contest. I will update as soon as I can the next post with all the info about how it went!
But here is a sneak peak!
