Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Contest?

Ever stared at the gathering of five characters on the homepage?

I thought it'd be kind of neat if there were some kind of contest (maybe once every so often), where you had to draw a grouping of random Featured characters, and the winner's picture was added to a random circling of Group shots for that front page.

Or the contest could even be--choose one Featured character, you're given a set scale, and five or so winners are chosen, and the pictures combined into one 'group' shot that's added to the front page.

I don't know, thought it'd be a fun idea.

I've thought about changing up the front page many times, although at this point I've mostly thought about it in terms of drawing a new batch myself or commissioning someone to do so. I'm not sure that we're at a reasonable capacity to run a contest for drawing an entire group of characters. I'd be afraid that the response would be much too low to make it worthwhile. Drawing one character is work enough, and five or more characters can be a doozy. We'd have to offer some pretty enormous prizes to make that tantalizing enough to skilled artists who know exactly what a challenge that could be. I suppose we could do a contest for drawing one character from a certain genre, then combine the winners in each genre, but that's likely to look really odd when a bunch of different art styles collide.

I'm also not entirely comfortable with having featured characters drawn to use on the front page, as character designs remain the property of their creator. Which would mean I would not entirely own the rights to the finished work, and what I could do with it would be restricted. I'd like to be free to use the winning imagery anywhere on the site, on advertisements, that sort of thing. If I were going to run a contest for the Homepage Five, I'd give a list of genres, and ask people to draw character designs that they felt embodied that genre. Like, for example, pick five of the following: Sci-Fi, Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Fantasy, Mutants, Victorian, Superheroes, Medieval, Furre, etc. etc.

I do want to run a variety of contests, not all art related, in the very near future and have some solid plans and a schedule to roll them out. If those go really well I'd be more comfortable considering something like this.