New ASCII Art Contest at deviantART

Hello Everybody,

After a series of posts that were relatively unrelated to ASCII art and text art in general, now a pure one that ONLY talks about ASCII Art and nothing else. Ha, I knew that you missed those hehe.

Maija Haavisto aka DiamonDie organized another ASCII art contest over at deviantART.com. You might be familar with DiamonDie from Finland, because I have her ASCII Art Tutorial up on my site as part of my ASCII Art Academy for some time now.


What is she looking for?

Draw something in ASCII that I haven't seen before, something creative in technique, style, concept and/or subject matter. You could make something surreal, abstract, political, dadaistic or otherwise strange.

What is she NOT looking for?

... no kittens, Pikachus, roses or Santa Claus, unless you can make them stand out somehow.

No pornographic entries or anything that would violate the U.S. law, pretty much everything else goes.

There are the following technical requirements, because ASCII art is a bit too broad and not everything that falls under the term Text art or ASCII art is allowed for this contest.

• The entry must be an ASCII picture, of at least 10x10 and at most 80x200 characters (that's 80 characters per line and 200 lines). The entry must be drawn in a fixed-width font. Sorry, no extended characters (8-bit), colored ASCII or ANSI this time. If you don't know what this means, make sure you only use characters included in the green part of this table.
• The entry must be original and created by hand. Entries made with an image to ASCII converter are not taken into account. If your image looks converted or ripped, you will need to present a proof that you made it (ie. so called "step files", save the picture into several different files while drawing it).
• You can enter at most three pictures. You don't have to be a DA member to enter*.

* Just FYI. The deviantART membership is free and should not have been a hurdle for you in the first place that prevents you from entering the contest (or it would have been a very lame excuse if you would be using this excuse as a reason not to enter). Well, she does not make it a requirement this time, so it does not matter. One lame excuse was just eliminated before it even started hehe.

Submissions

Send a link to your artwork for download (you can upload it free at MediaFire.com or also at your account at deviantART (which is a bit trickier) via a personal note to DiamonDie using the deviantART internal mail system or via direct email to maija AT writeme DOT com.

Deadline

The deadline of the contest is 7/7/2008, July 7, 2008, no matter how you interpret the date (its the same in US and UK date format) :)

Prizes
What is in it for you?

The winner gets a "Dark Domain DVD" from ACiD Productions shipped free to your place anywhere on this planet (but where mail can be delivered). So living not in Europe or the United States is also not a reason for not entering the contest. :)

Dark Domain is a DVD-Rom (for the Computer), which contains text art from 1987 to the present, art packs, emags, text files and more. A complete and detailed list of all files included on this DVD-ROM may be found at www.darkdomain.org/allfiles.zip. The DVD is full and almost impossible to check entirely, unless you have some months of time to spare to look at the tens of thousands of images, ASCII and ANSI art pieces.

I list the DVD for a long time already at my scene related "online shop" here at RoySAC.com. There are a lot of other nice gems that might be of interest for you (sorry, but not part of the prizes for this contest)

To read all the details about the contest yourself, check out the original news post by DiamonDie at deviantART.com. Happy drawing and good luck to you.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

p.s. I might throw in something as well, like I did for Diamondie's ASCII art contest in 2006. I just don't know what I should throw in and if I should make it a surprise again as I did last time. I will check with Maija ;-).

Contest Ruling Is Finally In - Special Bonus Prizes Revealed

The ruling for the ANSI/ASCII Text Art contest at deviantART is finally in. I blogged about the end of it and my personal favorite about a week ago. Unfortunately did the other judges not agree with me.

What surprised me a bit was that skylined's entry did not even make the top 5, but it shows how different the opinions of the 6 judges were. Being voted #1 by one judge does not make it a sure win.

Somebody that was voted #3 or #4 by all judges has a much higher chance of winning.

Here is how the judging works. Every Judge has 15 points to assign, 5 points to the #1, 4 points to the #2, 3 to #3, 2 to #5 and finally 1 point to the #1. This makes 90 points altogether for all 6 judges combined. 5 points does not look like that much anymore, right?

Anyway, all entries can be reviewed here if you want to check them out. The 5 Winners are the following:

Next to the official prizes will every one of the five winners get a one of my "deviantART ASCII" Mouse pads (since all winners were ASCIIs), a small Magnet of my "deviantART ANSI" print and a post card of my ANSI print as well. I hope the winners will like the little extra bonus prizes. Merry Christmas.

Cheers,

Carsten

The ASCII/ANSI Contest Is Over

Last week did the ASCII and ANSI contest at deviantART end. You can see all contributions to the contest here. I already made my judgements, but a few are still outstanding. That means that no results are available yet.

Yet I still want to present my personal favorite. The artists name is Berend-Jan Wever aka skylined.

His contribution is the 7bit ASCII called "Julia at Awakenings". Here is a small version of the image. It is not original size. Click on the image to get to the deviation which is in original size that you can clearly see that it is made out of regular characters which you can find on your keyboard.



I like the style. I like the ASCII logo of his name actually even better. Especially this one. .






Yep, it's a shark. I think that the Idea alone is already astonishing, let alone the realization by using simple text characters.


The following two logos look like "Disco" style.. without the bright colors hehe. I don't like them as much, but they are somewhat cool anyway.

This one seems to be the predecessor of the contest entry. The Idea is already visible, but the realization is much simpler than for "Julia at Awakenings".




Well, I am looking forward to hear the ruling. More to that later this week.

The Non-Existent ASCII/ANSI contest extended!

The deadline for the deviantART ASCII/ANSI art contest, which I blogged about earlier this month, was extended for a few more days. This will be the last chance to enter and win some great prices for everybody with some Text art skills who has not entered the contest yet.

Also some other things changed a little. Here are the words from DiamonDie who is the initiator and organizer of the contest.

Sorry for the bit of a late notice, but the deadline of the Non-Existent ASCII/ANSI contest has been pushed back by two weeks, making 9th of December the new deadline.

Due to the very small amount of ANSI entries we'll probably have to merge the two contest categories, but in that case we'll be offering prizes (subscriptions and DVDs) to five winners. That means you stand a good chance of winning something!

So those of you who have said you'll participate but haven't and those who have had their entries disqualified and have agreed to fix them, you've got two more weeks left. Even if you had missed the original contest announcement you still have time to draw an entry. So start typing already!

There will also be a surprise which will be announced AFTER the contest (or it would not be a surprise, wouldn't it? :) )

So you better get the Text Editors on the coming days and get something delivered before the new deadline.

You can check the contests rules here, if you haven't already done so earlier.

ASCII and ANSI Art Contest at deviantART

It's a bit late for it, but better late than never. There is also still plenty of time for people that are interested to participate.

You Text Artists out there, get your editors started up and start creating some nice Text Art. This is also a good chance for newbies to get your art seen by others and useful feedback.

DiamonDie over at deviantART.com launched an ASCII / ANSI Contest with the topic "Non-Existent"

The Deadline for the contest is 25th of November 2006. The entries can be edited until the deadline. You can read the details and Contest Rules in DiamondDie's News Article at deviantART.

Is it worth your time to participate in this contest? You bet it is! Not only fame and fortune can be gained, but great prizes too.

Okay no fortune , but a lot of fame and did I mention the prizes? How do these prizes look like? Pretty, don't they?

Prizes
1st prize in both categories ASCII and ANSI:
a copy of the Dark Domain DVD from ACiD Productions and a one-year subscription to DeviantART

2nd prize in both categories ASCII and ANSI:
a six-month subscription to DeviantART

3rd prize in both categories ASCII and ANSI:
a three-month subscription to DeviantART



I will be one of the judges hence not take part in the contest myself. I am looking forward to see your contributions.

You can read all the details about the contest, including the detailed rules, background information about ANSI/ASCII Art contests in general, ASCII and ANSI tools used, Tutorials and more in her Article about the Contest Announcement.

Hop over to deviantART.com to check it out. If you don't have an Account yet, then it is about time to get one; it's free so there is no reason not to.

Good Luck and no, I can not be bribed :)
Cheers,

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Ad Hunt Contest Winner Announced at dA

Well, deviantART.com is up again and I was able to announce the Winner of my little "Ad Hunt" Contest at my deviantART Journal.

I also got a response back from the lucky Winner. A female deviant from "Down Under" with the dA User Name ShellDevil-Art.

She wanted me to pick from her dA Print Wish-list for her, so I did. The order is placed and soon will the reward be on its way to the land of the kangaroos and koalas.

Here are some of her photographs which she made available at her Gallery on her dA User page.

Now I Can Dance

Mushroom Fairy

Lost At Sea

Flower Series 01

Nice, don't you think?

The overall positive response makes me seriously consider to repeat the contest again this year. Some very disappointed, because they found out about it too late, but thought that it was a very cool and unique contest they have never seen before at dA.

I believe it was a win-win combination. Everybody had fun. Nobody had to do stupid things. What more can I ask for?

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Ad Contest Winner Announcement delayed - dA down!

What a bummer. I just wanted to announce the winner of my DeviantArt "Ad Hunt" Contest, but the whole site is down.

I was lucky that it was accessible earlier. I contacted the Winner before I wanted to make the announcement. I hope the Winner got the message.

Well, there is not much I can do at the moment but wait that it is up again.
An unfortunate delay which forces me to change my schedule.

I hope that it is nothing serious.

Soccer World Cup 2006 in Germany Started

Today started the biggest Sport event in the world which is watched by more people than the Olympic Games.

Four years ago did I receive some good meant comments from friendly fellow Americans, who reminded me, that the Superball is not this time of the year. The rest simply ignored me having no clue what I was talking about.

But this year is everything a bit different. The fact that the American National Team beat first Mexico and then almost Germany, two "soccer nations", the Information that they were making it as far as the Quarter Finals eventually got around in a Nation that considers Soccer a sport for Girls (The Women Soccer Team was always one of the Top Teams in the World).

Back then when the US kicked Mexico out of the play-offs and moved up to the quarter finals took nobody notice, While the US Team had the success of their Life did the general US population (excluding the Latinos) watch the re-run of an old Seinfeld episode. Comments on the Day after reached from "I am not buying anything" to "That explains why the Mexican/American made such a long face today.".

Now it's 2006 Time for another World Cup (every 4 years), this time being held in Germany, the country I was born and grew up in. I was amazed, that Americans began to mention that the soccer world cup is going to start in Germany soon.

Today on Friday 6/9/06 was the opening match and the nation that was until now as far advanced in Soccer Culture as the Pacific Island/Kingdom of Tonga in the development of High Speed Railway Trains.

The match was between the host of the Cup, Germany and Costa Rica and was played at the capital of the Independent State of Bavaria, Munich; the location which became with it's annual Oktoberfest the synonym for Germany and German Culture.

Germany won 4:2 which was not a surprise since Germany is one of the Favorites for the Title. Germany lost against Brazil at the 2002 World Cup Final. Germany won the title 3 times already only topped by Brazil who won 5 times.

Germany won the 1954, 1974 and 1990 World Cups. The World Cup Title in 1990 was a blessing for Germany.

The Berlin Wall fell less than 1 year earlier and the German reunion was only a few month away. For the few weeks of the Cup and the ecstasy of joy that followed the Winning of the Title reaching its peak when east and west Germany were united again on October 3rd, after 45 years of separation, a true feeling of unity was felt across the nation which was unfortunately not going to last much longer after.

The separation is felt to this day,socially and economically. Remember, the reunion was almost 16 years ago. There is the hope, that this world cup in Germany might can accomplish what years of political work failed to accomplish. The true feeling of unity again.

I left Germany over 7 years ago and are living for 6 years in the US now.

I will share my favors between the German National Team of course and the US National Team which is considered again a strong contender.I hope that I will be able to enjoy several games together with American Friends this time and not only with my European and Mexican/American friends. I will remain neutral if the US and Mexico should clash again, but be on Germany's side whenever they will meet the US or Mexico in a peaceful duel.

FIFA Soccer World Cup 2006 / Germany - Start June,9th (Munich) - Final July, 9th (Berlin)

If you want to learn more about Germany and the Soccer World Cup, visit the following resources.

Germany.Info - Info and Resource Website, Email Newsletter and Podcast in English Language provided by the German Embassy to the United States of America. The Podcast features currently short mini videos introducing the individual National Teams.

M4V World Cup 2006 Intro
M4V Video for Team USA

Visit the Homepage of the International Football Association (FIFA) or Fifa World Cup Homepage. The 2006 Soccer World Cup is sponsored by Yahoo!

For further reading check the Wikipedia entry about the History of the German National Football (soccer) Team

Let's scream together this year: Toooooooor ... or .... Goooooooooal!