The usefulness of contests

[Chaoz]

How useful are contests in terms of marketing your self? I just recently read a thread that i cant find the address anymore. In the thread two senior members(dont remenber names excpet for their forum avatar seemed like a flying fish person and an old lady with a monocular replied that contests are pretty useless for marketing. but doesnt contests get you noticed and the drive to create work for your portfolio. I mean people see your art in contests such as Chow and Cow the participants dont get any prizes except for that green thing for winning(or i dont think) and not alot of employers look in there but you get noticed by people therefore building a network and therefore getting you noticed more. Also you have a topic from contests to create art for and a reason to do the work and there by building your portfolio. So why would contests be useless for marketing as mentioned by those two members? if you think there are other reasons that contests that are useful please post.

[dierat]

I think they mean marketing to potential clients. Yeah, participating in contests is a great way to motivate yourself, create a network of peers, and get direct feedback on your work, but the people looking at those contests tend to be other artists, not art directors or people who commission artists. (Though there are some exceptions - I think the Art Order competitions get a lot more traffic from art directors than other contests.) So it's not that contests are worthless; it's that they're probably not going to directly lead to paid work.

[Aly Fell]

dierat maketh good point! Contests are far from useless, but they are subjective in their outcome and therefore flawed as an idea when it comes to art. How many times have you looked at the results of a competition to be dismayed at the winner? Subjectivity. But I guess that's not really the point of your question. However, if you choose to regard a competition as a brief that needs fulfilling you can use it to advance your skills and abilities by imagining that the brief is a client's instructions ( albeit one where they don't change their mind at the end! )

As a marketing tool, it will depend on how high profile the competition is and who sees it, and how you then choose to promote your finished piece. On a personal level, I did one particular image for Chow, which was seen on my website by a guy from Simon and Schuster. I'm now on a seventh cover for them, and this has led me to produce a cover for DAW books as well. All because of a rather gruesome image I did for Chow in one weekend. With any competition you have to ask 'what will I get out of this'. For some it may be the simple idea of 'winning'. For others the fun of taking part, and for others the actual process of creating something that has built in parameters. But competitions are just one way of using the enormous options these days to promote yourself if you are serious about developing a lasting career in 'art' and certainly in illustration. Ergo: pick your contests.

[Noah Bradley]

It depends on the competition and it depends on what you're after. As dieran mentioned, the ArtOrder challenges get seen by a lot of really important artists and art directors. I know I personally had a fair bit of success with those--it got my work noticed by some ADs who I now work with. Contests that get too big and too amateurish have the risk of you getting lost in the crowd.

[arenhaus]

If it's a contest run by artists or art directors for exercising creative muscle and showing off, go for it.

If it's a contest run by companies to get some art for commercial use, run like hell.

[bcarman]

I can't tell you how much positive exposure and work contests like The Society of Illustrators and Spectrum have gotten me. They put me on the map. I also can't tell you how many nasty letters I've written to companies and people who are trying to take advantage of me and my students by getting work for free in the guise of a contest.

But also support what dierat said some are good for peer exposure and starting on that path to recognition. Building in steps can't hurt.

If you have a question about a contest ask advice from someone who knows.

[vineris]

"How useful are contests in terms of marketing your self?"

What kind of contests? They run the range from "Respectable competition that looks good on your resume if you place" to "It's embarrassing you even entered this. Tell no one."

[Chaoz]

tell me about this Art order and other good contests to get into

[dierat]

tell me about this Art order and other good contests to get into

Try googling 'art order' http://theartorder.com/

For other contests, publications like Spectrum and the Ballistics books are also going to give you decent marketing (from what I've heard anyway), but of course they attract a lot of very skillful artists and are more difficult to get into.

[seba_boi]

Didn't J.C. Leyendecker got his big break when he won the contest for the Century Magazine cover during the turn of the century?...