Gauntlet's Art Contest!

The date was August, 2004. The Great Sprite Contest 4 had begun and Planet Megaman's Summer contest had almost ended. This got me to thinking I wanted my own contest. So, on a whim and with organization done in under a minute the Gauntlet Art Contest was born!

The rules were simple: draw any version of Shadowman, Torchman, Bizarro Shadowman, or Gauntlet (this was, after all, MY art contest; I could be as ego-trippy as I wanted!). You could include any other character you want so long as it had one of the others mentioned.

The prizes? These fabulous roms!

Rockman Zero aka Rockman X3 - First place gets the extremely rare Rockman X3 rom I found! This one is *not* a common sight and is definitely good for hours of playing time. It features freaky new Mavericks and tons of surprises.

Thunder Blast Man - Second place gets the rare (but not quite as rare) rom of Thunder Blast Man. As the basis of the well-known "Rocman X" pirate game, this also offers hours of fun before you get frustrated and scream in a rage!

Yep, crappy prizes indeed, but the contest was more for fun than anything else. Oddly enough there was like .... three or four people who were greatly offended at being offered crappy roms as prizes and gave me a hard time at PMM's news comments section. Well, this is a small, crappy, internet contest, so it's only fitting that the prizes also be small and crappy!

All in all I figured the contest would be a smash success with 4 contestants. I ended up with 10, far exceeding my expectations. And so, the winners are:

Cutman.EXE

With his amazing Bizarro Shadowman kit bash! An actual action figure sculpted by Cut himself with over 50 points of articulation. Really, it was above and beyond anything I ever expected out of this contest. How can this not get a first prize award??

Bizarro Kit bash - Cutman.EXE
Cut: First off, I have to apologize for the absolute crap that is the quality of the above figures. I'll probably reshoot this guy in a bit, but I was about to throw my camera at the wall in disgust. Second, I do believe this is my most in depth creation ever. I spent a solid week on him, so I hope that at least shows. I put lots of little details into it, like the scratched and cracked blue armour, the oil oozing out some unrepaired areas, and the jewel like effects in his eyes, helmet, gun, and even the bottom of his one good foot. He has a sort of "built in somebody's garage look", which is exactly what I was after. I wanted him to look like some abomination from the movie "Virus", a lumbering psychopath. He has 80 movable points around his body, which includes his tentacles and compound hand joints, and uses a special tube wire to simulate the tubes you might find on an actual robot. Metallic paints were used liberally here, including True Blue Pearl and Gunmetal and Aluminium plate buffing metallizers, which can simulate real metals easily.

And, for second place.....

Quickman

With "Assimilation"! It was tough trying to pick a second place entry . I had it narrowed down to Quick's entry and the 'Maniacs' very own Raijin K. In the end it came down to complexity of the image. Is Quick's picture more complex than Raijin's? IMO, the answer is yes. Slightly so. Not an easy call though, and my congrats go to Raijin for his truly awesome entry, but Quick nets second place! It has a nice, creepy feel to it and I really like that. The background and tubes all show very nice detail and it's just a good peice of art.

Assimilation - Quickman

Quick: This was drawn on 11X14 Bristol board, and the scanner bed is about 9X12, so I couldn't get the entire pic. This took me about 2 days to draw, all in pen. I'm not gonna colour it, so it's staying black-and-white. I used alotta Giger references for that one, and only one Borg reference (mostly for that lightning plate thing, and even then, I just BSed it.). Yeah, I stole Doc Oc's arms, but I thought they looked cool, and those hose-tentacle things on BS's back needed some added features. Based off of the pic that Gauntlet drew, I drew up a few reference sketches, and tweaked BS to my liking. I added allot more hoses and tubes, changed the armour neckline to resemble the Borg Queen's, and added those nice flesh-stretching hooks. And I realized something as I was finishing that pic off... The entire design and layout resembles some bizarre freakish crucifixion. I mean, you got the pose, you got your weird-ass angel wing things, hell, you even have a weird halo! I didn't intend for that to turn out like that, but it sure looks spiffy that it did.

Congrats to all entries! I hasten to add that I didn't coerce or bribe anyone in entering my contest! And a few entries are from people I don't know personally either! So, thanks everybody! Maybe I'll make another contest one day ..... and next time with legitimate prizes!

Shadowman oekakai - Luke Souer	ambush - Zilch	Gauntlet - Hirundine	Gauntlet - Ej, Large Version
Gauntlet - ksakers	Shadow Man - Maxell 5	Shadowman - Daniel O'Connor	bizarrovirus - RaijinK