The Newtown Arts Festival Artwork Selection Committee invites you to submit your artwork to our contest! The winning submission will be used to promote the Arts Festival and will appear in businesses and public spaces around Newtown and surrounding towns. The artwork will also be printed on t-shirts, tote bags, and other items that will be available for purchase at the Newtown Arts Festival. Imagine your own artwork promoting the 2012 Newtown Arts Festival!
Artwork Contest Guidelines and the Newtown Arts Festival Artwork Application are available by clicking links to the right. Submissions are due to the Festival Artwork Selection Committee c/o Koenig FrameWorks, 97 South Main Street (Route 25), Newtown, CT 06470 beginning February 1 through February 29, 2012 during regular business hours (Monday through Saturday 10 AM - 5 PM). Late entries will not be accepted. Please call Donna Mangiafico, NCAC Secretary at 203-788-7474 or email her at djmangiafico@aol.comif you have questions.
While we do not want to discourage creativity in any way, we do want you to be aware that the Artwork Selection Committee may disqualify many absolutely outstanding works of art simply because they do not fit technical requirements. The committee considers how artwork will look on a poster, t-shirt, and other promotional materials and merchandise. Artwork must be beautiful as well as practical for it to work as our poster/t-shirt design.
Here are some suggestions on how to make sure your submission will be usable:
· Do not use crosshatching as shading - very, very fine pen lines, spaced closely together in a crosshatching technique, are not cleanly reproducible on cloth. Unlike paper, t-shirt fabric is textured. The fineness of detail achievable is therefore limited in comparison to what can be achieved on the smooth surface of paper.
· Stay away from large geometric borders - frames or borders using large geometric shapes, which must be precisely controlled during printing, will often become skewed or distorted on fabric. T-shirt fabric is not dimensionally stable like paper, therefore during the printing and handling process the material will shift and large geometric shapes become distorted.
· Avoid watercolors - Soft gradations of color, such as what is seen in watercolor work are exceedingly difficult to reproduce in the t-shirt screen-printing process. Screen-printing is a stenciling process that relies on modulating the density of a spatter pattern of fairly large flecks of color to simulate gradations of color. The spatter flecks make watercolor reproduction onto a t-shirt inexact. When possible we will avoid selecting watercolors as winning entries.
· Don't use too much white - artwork is printed on colored fabric, not white. Thus, whenever white or pale tints of color are used in original artwork, white ink must be printed on the shirt. All of the subtleties of pale color seen in original artwork will not be reproducible on t-shirts.
· Dimensions should be roughly the same - Entries definitely do not have to be exact squares, but your submission should be pretty close in height and width dimensions. Panoramic artwork does not fit well on posters or t-shirts.
Good luck in creating your design and thanks for participating! Again, the deadline for submissions is February 29, 2012.
Sincerely,
Newtown Arts Festival Artwork Selection Committee
