For the Love of Contests

One of my goals for this year is to participate in a contest each month. Contests are a wonderful way to give yourself a deadline, and push your limits to learn something new. Now that I am out of school, and  somewhere in between free-lance designer and employee for my parents' business, I find that I need to push myself more than I did when I was in school.

For the month of January, I failed miserably. I had intended to design a fabric for one of Spoonflower.com's weekly contests. If you have never had the opportunity to check out Spoonflower, I highly recommend doing so. They are a fantastic website that gives you the opportunity to design your own fabric and actually get it printed! There is also a wide range of beautiful designs available to chose from that other artists have already uploaded. My favorite part is the contests though, and at some point this year, I will enter one!

Because of my failure at making it into any contests for the month of January, I decided that I would just have to enter two contests in February. To my surprise, there is a wide range of contests on DeviantArt.com. I found two different fashion illustration contest groups to join, and designed something for each one. 

This dress was for the "Greek Mythology" theme for the "Fashion Illustrators" group.
My dress design is based on Heracles fighting the Hydra. If you want more of a description, go check it out on my Deviant Art account.

This dress design was for the "Ugly by Design" contest in the group "Catwalk Challenge" on DeviantArt.
There were several ugly patterns given for this contest, and the challenge was to use at least two in one design.  This was what came of my design, which I had to do all of the rendering on Photoshop to keep the patterns.

Back in January, I did some surfing on the web to see if I could find some design contests that required sewing and fashion shows and the like. I found a really cool one involving the "International Talent Support", which is located in Italy and has design labels that come to watch the show! I had to create a collection of 5 to 8 looks with a specific inspiration.

I have been quite obsessed with Ancient Egyptian Mythology lately, and after purchasing a book about it on my birthday, I found plenty of interesting topics to inspire a collection. I chose "the Book of Gates," which is a work that describes the passage of Ra (the sun god) through the Tuat (the Underworld). There are 12 divisions of the underworld, each with a gate and large serpent guarding it. Each of these serpents have a name, and in order for the deceased person to get to Amenti (sort of a heaven), they must have the names of the snakes to get through the gates. For Ra, he has to pass through all of the divisions to get through the other end. The 12 divisions represent the 12 hours of night, so when Ra emerges at the end, it is morning.

I designed a menswear collection inspired by the different divisions of the Tuat.

My collection for the ITS Fashion Show.

I mailed my package at the end of last week, and will hear in mid-April if I am a selected finalist. If I get in, that means I get to actually make all of these garments by July (when the actual show is), and the really awesome part is, ITS will fly me and my collection to Italy for the show! So send me all of your good energy so that I make it as a finalist!!

For next months contest, I am thinking I might try for a t-shirt design contest.

Anyone of my readers a crazy contest person like me?