skeeve

From a judge perspective....

I participated in multiple painting competitions both on local “state” and national levels but always on a competing side of things. This year was the first time I was actually judging a competition like this. First thing first. Demon in the city is a local New York City competition held by NYC GW store. While we try to advertise the event as wide as we can and encourage outside participation most (probably all) painters represented are from NYC. The 6^th of November is the Birthday of our GW store (the store itself is 13 years old actually) and we figured that it would be a good day to have a city-wide painting competition. Usually, this competition is organized by GW and judged by GW employees. This year, however, organization and judging were independent and GW only provided us with the venue, moral support, advice and expert opinion when we needed it. We had about a month to put this together and in all frankness next time I would like to have more time (or fewer other things I had to deal with during this month).

  We limited competition to five categories 1) Single, 2) Large+vehicle, 3) Squad+regiment, 4) Open and 5) Young blood.  A special thanks goes to Alex Cohen and John Jordan who sculpted and cast the “golden” demon. Again having more time (and minimal budget) we could have cast it for all three places in all categories, instead of creative use of bloodletter on textured plinthsJ.

  Both participation and overall quality considerably exceeded my expectations. As probably anybody else I hate competition when you have 4 entries per category so whoever enters “win” something by default.  We had about 50-60 entries spread between various categories. I wouldn’t mind to have more but… the GW place was pretty much at capacity, at some point I left the store and just stand outside the window… you know a man needs his oxygenJ. If these competitions become more popular in the future we will have to think about space.

    Looking from a judge perspective I feel sorry for GD judges… I think only need to keep decorum in public stop them from starting fist fight. Surprisingly judging a strong category is easy, weak ones however resulted in several deadlocks when we have to go to GW employees to get tie-breaking votes. When you don’t like any entries you have to separate them based on who made fewer mistakes. Not only it is extremely tedious, it is boring too. Our most difficult category was the “large-vehicle” where we spend almost half an hour going back and forth. We had a decision but nobody (myself included) was completely satisfied with it. In the future, I think we should separate this category back into vehicles and “large”. Techniques for painting vehicles and “large” miniatures (say a giant) are rather different and too difficult to compare.

    We had a similar problem with the third place in the “Squad regiment” where first two places were rather obvious and then we had about 10 entries that were uniformly average; choosing something that is less average then the others is a rather boring task.

Personal thanks to GW employees. Ian, Don, John you were great. Don literally protected us from roaring crowds who wanted to see the process. That would not be the problem but at some point the were really pushing these cabinets with minies that kinda made me nervous :.

All this judging and runing around didn't leave much time for picture taking.  Oh well may be next time.