[Art Writing Challenge] Elemental Magic

Elemental Magic

Greetings PaperDemon's. For the month of March and April we are running a creative challenge around the theme of elemental magic. (I can't believe it's March already. We just started 2020. What the hell?)

How to participate

  • For each week in the month of March create a work of art or 100 word drabble using the prompts provided. By the end, you'll have four works total.*

  • If you'd like critique on your drafts, it's best to submit them before Thursday each week for Critique Thursday.

    • Artists can request for critique by marking this during the submission process or sharing their draft to the #critique channel in the discord.

    • Writers will need to pop into the discord server with a link to their draft in the #critique channel.

  • Submit your work to PaperDemon.com before April 30th, 2020. If you're submitting artwork, tag it with the tag pd-elemental for 45XP per artwork

* If four works of art in a month is too much, you're welcome to modify the challenge to do less. You can also play catchup and post later. But to earn XP on an art submission, it must be posted by March 31st.

Prompts

Water

Week of March 2nd

Some concepts related to water are healing, ocean, ice, and snow.

Air

Week of March 16th

This one stumpts me at first but air can be interpreted in many different ways. My first thought was mindfulness and focusing on the breath. But you can also interpreted as things like wind and spirit.

Fire

Week of March 30th

Probably the most obvious of the elements to portray. But it can also be interpreted as energy, lightning, lava, or the sun.

Earth

Week of April 13th

In addition to plant life and rocks, this can also be interpreted as minerals, metals, earthquakes, and planets in space.

Inspiration

I've put together a Pinterest board for you with some images to help inspire you or provide reference. Be sure to follow us on social media to because as we find new images will be sharing them there. We're on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Did you find something inspiring? Post it to social media and tag us or reply to this post with a link!

More tips

You can take the prompts more literally or you can interpret them more abstractly. It also doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with magic. It just sounded cool as a challenge title!

Try to come up with some sort of theme or story element or character, consistent visual style or border that would tie them all together. For example, you could draw one of your original characters in four separate scenes. Having four works of art that follow a theme can help you get more interest and repeat customers of your prints. Many people like to collect series of things. You could even make it into a quadriptych.

Alphonse Mucha has done several series like this. One of his most famous is four seasons.

Alphonse Mucha Four Seasons

Spice it up (18+ only)

We haven't done a Red Curtain themed challenge in a while. I definitely welcome and invite you to take a kinky approach to this challenge.

One idea is thinking about the elements as emotions in relationships. For example fire could be interpreted as passion or anger. Earth might be interpreted as support, safety, or strength.

I look forward to seeing the creative direction you take this.

Image attributions: Iceberg by enriquelopezgarre from Pixabay. Fire by adrian schüpbach from Pixabay. Clouds by Free-Photos from Pixabay. Death Valley by Free-Photos from Pixabay.

 

Article updates:

 

  • Members are excited about this challenge but they'd like more time. You requested, we listened! Challenge extended through end of April.
  • Deadlines and times for the elements have been updated.