Posts with tag fan-art

The World of Warcraft has always had amazing fan art. Looking through the fan art gallery, it's hard not to get blown away by the talent the community has and their passion for drawing Blizzard properties. This year, the folks in Irvine decided to celebrate all that talent and passion by holding a contest for the artistically-inclined. Zarhym invites artists over at the official forums to contribute to the Holiday Fan Art Calendar Contest.

The idea is to create a piece of World of Warcraft art that sets the tone for a particular month based on the in-game holidays. Artists can choose to depict scenes from or situations inspired by events from the Lunar Festival, Love Is in the Air, Noblegarden, Children's Week, Midsummer Fire Festival, Pirate's Day, Brewfest, Harvest Festival, Hallow's End, Day of the Dead, Pilgrim's Bounty, Feast of Winter Veil, all the way to New Year's Eve. Winners will be featured in the 2011 Official World of Warcraft Calendar as well as win a set of 2010 wall, daily, and mini calendars.

One grand prize winner will also get to take home a Wacom Cintiq 12WX, the pen-on-screen drawing tool that some of Blizzard's own artists use. Additionally, the grand prize winner will also have his or her work featured in the official World of Warcraft magazine. Deadline for submissions is on February 8, 2010. As always, be sure to read the fine print if you're eligible!

World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

This week, we've got a golden oldie for you. Jennifer Jean Lee's night elf/orc pavement chalk, created way back in 2006, resurfaced recently on Twitter after a belated nod from @Warcraft's #BlizzSpotlight, which highlights noteworthy fan-made crafts.

We followed up with artist Jennifer Jean Lee, who's long since retired from playing WoW. "Back in the day when I did the chalk painting, I was a dedicated player," she wrote us. "I might go back one day, once I've accomplished some goals such as making iPhone apps and posting comics regularly." In the meantime, Jennifer's not completely given up on WarCrafting. She's currently at work on a number of WoW-related items for her Etsy shop, in preparation for the holidays.

Attention aspiring artist, songwriters, and machinimators: want to win an awesome Alienware laptop? Sure you do. Well, here's your chance. Blizzard is holding three creative contests at BlizzCon this summer: best fan art, best original song, and best movie using WoW footage (i.e. machinima).

Entrants in each category have until July 31 to submit their best work. Various countries and localities around the world are eligible, although not all; this is due to legal issues, and not Blizzard hating Italians and residents of Vermont (which Alex claims are called "Vermites").

For the full rules, see Blizzard's contest page, but the general guidelines for submissions are as follows:

• Art must be high-res Photoshop files.
• Movies must be under three minutes and 100 MB, and should be WMVs, AVIs, or MOVs. Music must be either by the entrant or by Blizzard.
• Songs must be MP3s under 2 minute and 5 MB. Lyrics (if any) should be without profanity, in English, Spanish, French, German, Korean, or Chinese, and if not in English, must come with a written English translation.

For second place in each category, Blizzard will be awarding some Razer equipment, and third place will get an unspecified NVIDIA video card. The top two winners in the Movie contest also each get a copy of Adobe CS4, which is pretty sweet. So get creating!

Blizzard has opened up registration for their Movie, Original Song, and Fan Art contests, and you can register for those along all over on their registration page (the Costume, Sound-alike, and Dance contests are also there, but it looks like they're not up for registration yet). These things are always a lot of fun, and it seems like every year, the bar goes even higher -- there's always a costume that just really impresses with the amount of work that went into it. Of course, don't let that stop you from entering: Sound-Alikes are always really funny and pretty easy to do, and I believe Original Song is a new category this year, so it's probably wide open in terms of what people will come up with. Come to think of it, we've actually got a song that might go in there...

Registration ends on the 24th of July for the current contests, so make sure to get your entries in now if you've got a movie, song, or a piece of fan art you think Blizzard might like. And there are some nice prizes -- looks like the grand prize in each contest is an Alienware laptop, with Razer and Nvidia gear and Adobe software filling out the rest of the places. Sign up now -- we can't wait to see what you guys bring to show off at the convention in August.

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.

First the legal crackdown on fan-made iPhone apps, and now this: German-based webcomic Shakes and Fidget, a longtime sight in our Sunday Morning Funnies column, has apparently been smacked with a cease-and-desist by Blizzard. Our German isn't that great (and we've reached out to the comic's creators for further comment), but a translation of this forum page tells us that Activision-Blizzard's legal department suggested to them that there was enough similarity between the official game and the unofficial comic to cause a problem, and while they believe that they're covered under parody laws, they decided to take the "offending" comics offline anyway, and are apparently currently working on editing them so that they can be put back up without any issues.

Obviously, since the comics are offline, we have no idea what material Blizzard objected to -- you could argue that depictions of certain gear created by Blizzard artists in the game or specific names are under trademark and thus could be protected under copyright law. But even then, Shakes and Fidget is one of many, many fan-made webcomics to obviously depict World of Warcraft and Blizzard-designed items specific to the game, and we haven't yet heard of any other webcomics that have been approached in this way.

Still, as they might say in Germany, wir riechen eine ratte. Without knowing the exact nature of the comics that Blizzard had an issue with, this seems like a complete overreach on their part, especially considering that it's some of their biggest fans who are making these comics, and that many artists have portrayed many videogames in webcomics without anyone confusing the issue of whether they were official or not. We'll keep an eye out for more information (and we've also contacted Blizzard for comment) -- if you know of any other webcomics or fan artists who've been approached by Blizzard in this way, definitely let us know.

Thanks, Henry!

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!

Our friends at The Guild made an ingame appearance the other day, but not in our game -- they showed up as avatars in Second Life as part of a talk show called the Copper Robot. Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh (Zaboo), and Jeff Lewis (Vork) all stopped by to talk to journalist Mitch Wagner (whom I met on the TUAW Talkcast last night), and you can watch video of the proceedings over on their blog, or just listen in to the audio if you'd like. And there's news about season 3 in the interview -- it should be happening, though Felicia says they haven't gotten "an official pickup" yet, and she hasn't started writing yet. The season 2 DVD is also coming soon.

What's perhaps most interesting about this interview is that the Guildies all used custom-made avatars to appear in the game. Second Life, if you've never played it, is more of a sandbox MMO than the strict rules and design of World of Warcraft, and players have mostly complete freedom to make themselves look like whatever they want. And so a few fans from a site called World2Worlds actually made some avatars for the Guild folks, and they based them off of the (also fan-made) art of the characters. We've never seen footage of "the game," as the characters in The Guild call it, so this is the first time we've seen these avatars represented in any game. Very interesting. The show has a Flickr group, so if you want to check out more shots of what they looked like in-game (including some nutty Vork antics), check that out as well.

A good time was had as always on last weekend's WoW Insider Show -- Adam Holisky kindly stepped into the broadcasting booth with Turpster and I, and we answered some emails (including whether it's OK to give cloth drops to leather wearers, as long as it's an upgrade, and more on which tanking class is the best to take with you), and talked turkey on the biggest stories in the World of Warcraft. We chatted about what might be in store for the next content patch and expansion, what's up with WoW's numbers still going up, and what's new with Wintergrasp in 3.1. We also had a straight-from-the-scene report about the PETA event -- stay tuned for more about that later today.

And we got some interesting Ret Monkey pictures -- the one to the right is by Hydralol of EU Magtheridon, and the other one in the gallery below is by Abbort from Hellscream. Both of these, and any other pictures that you can come up with of the Ret Monkey or any of us who work on the show can be eligible for our Fan Art contest, so enter that if you'd like.

Finally, we have rounded 6,000 followers on our Twitter account, and we're headed to 9,000 -- as we say on the show, it would be great if we could hit that by our 100th show, and combine everything into one big party-down spectacular. So tell your twitterfriends, especially those interested in WoW, to give us a follow. They (and you) won't regret it.

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Yo dawg, we heard you like Arenas, so we put an Arena in your Arena! Behold, WoW's Circle of Blood Arena map, transformed into a Team Fortress 2 map. Sure, it might not have the subtlety of Dustbowl or Well, but as a reproduction, it looks terrific. They even got the starting areas working right. And look at that sky!

You can download this map for TF2 and a very similar one for Counter-Strike: Source over at the creator's blog. I doubt it'll jump to the top of any major playlists any time soon, but if your usual group of TF2 friends also have spent some time in the Arenas, they'll probably get a kick out of it.

The idea of a six word story has been around for a while -- Ernest Hemingway famously wrote one that went: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." But Pink Pigtail had the idea to bring the format into the World of Warcraft, and challenges her readers to write some six word stories about Azeroth and/or its inhabitants. Larisa's "Last mage quits. Working as intended." is probably my favorite of hers, but you WI readers are pretty creative, too. Here's a few of mine:

"Fandral Staghelm is angry. Nobody cares."

"Lich King laughs, teleports away. Again."

"For sale: Gnomish capital. Slightly used."

Ok, that last one is pretty bad. Surely you can come up with some better ones, right?

Slorkuz posts that yesterday, February 11th, marked the four-year anniversary of World of Warcraft's release in the EU, and Blizzard is throwing a few contests to celebrate. You can see all of the giveaways over on their site -- there's some nice Swagdog and Dell gear to win for coming up with a great t-shirt slogan, a piece of fan art, or answering some lore questions. Unfortunately, participation in the contests is limited to only a few countries, due to local rules, but if you're interested and able, have at it.

Congrats to Blizzard and the EU for four full years in Azeroth! North America had our anniversary late last year, and WoW Insider put together a look back at what it was like for us. We all (including the EU) got the anniversary pet as well, so apparently, other than these contests, Blizzard is just giving this date a nod rather than a big in-game celebration. But there's always the ten year anniversary -- we'll see you in 2014!

This is awesome -- Jason Babler (who apparently works as a Creative Director at a videogame company during the day and sculpts for Mantle Studios at night) is putting together a sculpture of everyone's second favorite baddie, Illidan (Arthas is number one, right?), and as you can see above, it's coming along nicely. He started using a material called ProClay, but found it wasn't hard enough, so he's now using a wax called FUSE. It sounds like it's been quite a journey -- he says that he's resculpted every part of the figure at least twice. That's a lot of work.

But it does look good. As professional as his site looks, this is just a hobby for him, so unfortunately we probably won't get a chance to someday get a copy of this. But then again, you can really tell that Jason is doing this just because he loves it so much. The finished product will probably turn out great, but you can tell he's more interested in doing it the way he wants to rather than getting it done fast.