Newtown Arts Festival Artwork Contest Announced

Would you like to see your art on Newtown Arts Festival posters and T-shirts and a chance to win $500?

The Newtown Arts Festival Committee has announced the 2013 Artwork Contest. Entries will not be accepted until early February, but Artwork Selection Committee members want to give artists lead time consider their designs. The theme of the artwork must be “Iconic Newtown.”

The winning artist will receive $500 (to be paid after May 1, 2013), media coverage concerning the artist and his or her winning work, and will be featured on the Newtown Cultural Arts Commission website.

Artists can submit up to two illustrations. Works must be of professional quality and original artwork. Submissions cannot be framed or under glass.

Artwork should be generally 12 by 13 inches (the posters are 15½ by 23 inches).

The winning artist will need to be present at the 2013 Newtown Arts Festival for poster signing, usually for an hour or so each day.

If a design is preliminarily selected, artists may be asked to make some adjustments to better meet the needs of all the mediums to which the image will be applied. If agreement cannot be reached, the Artwork Selection Committee reserves the right to select another design as the winner.

While the committee does not want to discourage creativity in any way, artists should be aware that outstanding works of art may be disqualified 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 a poster and T-shirt design.

Here are some suggestions on how to make sure a 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.

*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.

*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.

*Keep dimensions roughly the same. Entries definitely do not have to be exact squares, but submissions should be pretty close in height and width dimensions. Panoramic artwork does not fit well on posters or T-shirts.

The 2013 Newtown Arts Festival will be Saturday and Sunday, September 21 and 22, at Fairfield Hills.

Complete guidelines and the Newtown Arts Festival Artwork Application are available online at NewtownArtsFestival.com.

Submissions will be accepted at Koenig FrameWorks, 97 South Main Street in Newtown, February 1 through February 16, during regular business hours (Monday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm). Late entries will not be accepted.

Contact Donna Mangiafico, Artwork Selection Committee Chairperson, at 203-788-7474 or DJMangiafico@aol.com for additional information.