speaking of competitions

Patience.

This hobby and art form of ours has so much to do with patience. Patience to have a steady hand, to steadily build a layer or gradually apply the 50th glaze over that armour panel. Do not lose patience when you feel you can just skip steps in a process. Or to look down the road of your progression goals and be patient in its development. Pair this with good discipline, and you have the strongest of foundations to take your skills to new peaks. But Patience can also be applied to other things, and with the recent 2022 Golden Daemon painting contest done; this is a good situation where being patient with your tongue pays off. Or for others without patience, their speech can spit venom and even bite their own words.

This year's competition was full of brilliant and beautiful entries. Some were rewarded for their amazingly flawless lines, some daring in their complexity, and others rewarded for newer modelling techniques that deserve a shot in the spotlight. Besides the awards given out, the internet has followed up with of course a million critiques of the winners. It's natural to want to shout out your favourites regardless of their placement, and/or wishing they placed higher etc. But it's the punching down on winners who some people think that they shouldn't have won, or didn't deserve it that troubles me in our hobby community. Regardless of entries, no one deserves to be put down for entering, let alone winning on a model into which they have poured countless hours. Putting all of the years of passion and experience into a single entry that caught the eyes of the judges to take the top prize home. Remember, they just painted the model and entered it into a competition, and it's not their choice who wins or loses.

Put yourself in the winners' shoes. Seeing your name across countless Facebook posts, Instagram story rants and YouTube videos mentioning your winning entry didn't deserve it would hurt.

So you still want to talk about the winning models? That's fine, and it is especially important to those that want to use it for study in applying to grow their skills and possibly enter or improve an entry for next year. You must study works in this way to improve. But the angle you take in terms of your tone, and how you approach the subject is what's important. Important that you are not attacking the character of the artist, but taking a technical approach that focuses on the piece itself and how it relates to how it scored in a competition setting. It's easy to lash out and make comments that boil overstating, "How the hell did that model win?!?" Then proceed to make statements of lack of skill, bullshit and derogatory comments. Be patient, think about what you are saying and measure out how these entries won in the first place. Put yourself in the judge's shoes and learn the process of what it takes to judge a competition like Golden Daemon.

Paintings in themselves are subjective by nature, with some images bringing certain emotions out, connecting certain people to the artist stronger than others, and placing a wide variety of elements that each deems valuable onto a single canvas.

If you don't know how it's judged, then those are the first questions you should be asking yourself. And also ask yourself how strong of a painter you are when it comes to competition painting. From there you have a scale on which to work and will have to compensate for your degree of experience, skill, and a trained eye. Everyone is a critique, but we don't need more garbage out there with ill thoughts and poor judgments. Remember the internet has made the world a lot smaller, and if you are a winner of a Golden Daemon or any painting competition; that's something huge in our community of tiny miniatures.

Put yourself in the winners' shoes. Seeing your name across countless Facebook posts, Instagram story rants and YouTube videos mentioning your winning entry didn't deserve it would hurt. And that social impact within our community hurts it as a whole, where it could lead to a point of painters not wanting to compete anymore. That reduces the pool of dedicated painters who are willing to put countless hours into miniatures for us to see, enjoy, and even inspire. It damages us that future aspiring painters avoid these competitions entirely due to the volatile community lashing out. We should instead congratulate the winning painter on his talents, efforts, and him/her competing. Have constructive discussions among your friends on the various entries with the aim for you to learn from these examples, and better yourself. And lastly, if you think you can do better, then put your head down and get to work on your entry. Nothing worse than a critic that can't put out anything remotely close to the level in which is being done, or has enough creditable experience in the given field.

Thanks for reading the short entry into my thoughts that of course relate to the most recent Golden Daemon of 2022. I too was honestly shocked at some winners and had to take a step back and follow my advice. Be patient, think critically and not emotionally about the winners. Putting into account the winning conditions of Golden Daemon, and also asking questions to others with years of experience competing to get a better scope of the playing field. This answered a lot of my questions, has prepared me further for competing in next year's competition and reminded me of a simple rule of a painting comp. These types of competition like many forms of visual artwork are subject to interpretation. Paintings in themselves are subjective by nature, with some images bringing certain emotions out, connecting certain people to the artist stronger than others, and placing a wide variety of elements that each deems valuable onto a single canvas. To paint for a competition, you have to be ok with putting your values secondary and think of what the judges want to see. How much of that depends on you, but going into the competition with that understanding and identifying the field you tread across.