Birthday Contest Winners

We've finally gotten around to announcing and awarding the winners of our birthday flute contest!

Category 1:
Fluted wild that looks the most like the horse of the day on Mom's calendar

The winner is Julie's Datong!

Julie got lucky with a birthday calendar page full of horses. The 2 chestnuts with large white facial markings in the background sealed the win for the Datong. Her blaze also looks quite similar to the blaze of the appaloosa in the foreground.

The competition in this category was not exactly fierce. None of the rest of us fluted wilds remotely the same color as our calendar page horses.

Category 2:
Fluted wild with the prettiest/handsomest profile artwork

The winner is my (Lily's) Groningen!

This one was difficult to agree on, since all 4 of us fluted quite attractive horses. Felicity and I even fluted the same breed this year. My stallion's gorgeous roaning pattern and his cool diagonal leg markings ended up giving him the edge over the others. 

Felicity's handsome dapple grey Groningen was a close second.

Category 3:
Fluted wild with the coolest avatar

The winner is Felicity's Groningen!

HI2 avatars' crater rumps are always cool, and this contrast of dark on light is especially pleasing. 

Julie's Datong, with her subtle dapples and not-so subtle dark legs, came in 2nd:

My Groningen, who is handsome but looks more like a light buckskin than a roan, took 3rd:

And Bethany's not-so-exciting but still pretty blood bay Furioso took 4th.

Category 4:
Fluted wild with the best personality

We didn't get any clear winning personalities in this one, like "Best Friend" or "Class Clown." Instead, we got 2 generic "Uniques," a "Competitive," and a "Know-It-All." By adding up personality stats, Felicity's Groningen has the highest total with +32. He also has the least number of personality traits on the left side of the personality scale.

So, even though know-it-alls are at times annoying, we'll give the prize to him.

Category 5:
Fluted wild with the highest sum of stats for its breed

The winner is Bethany's Furioso!

She is the only horse that had a positive sum of stats for her breed: +5. 

My Groningen came in 2nd with -12.

Felicity's Groningen came in 3rd with -45.

Julie's Datong came in 4th with an impressively poor -82.

Category 6:
Fluted wild with the highest total sum of stats

Again, Bethany's Furioso wins!

Her stat total is 2280!

My Groningen is 2nd again with 2188 total stats.

Julie's Datong is 3rd with with 2168 total stats.

Felicity's Groningen is 4th with 2154 total stats.

That means 2 new companions for Felicity and Bethany, and 1 new companion for Julie and me! Here are the ones we picked:

Felicity's picks:

Moonlight the premium Egyptian Mau, who completes Galileo's companion collection

Silver the premium silver husky for Gromit

Bethany's picks:

Icy the grey overo foal for Lysithea

Razzle the premium Potoo for Quasar

Julie's pick:

Chasm the premium black Falabella for Ravine

My pick:

Peachy the premium lamb for Yetta. 

I tried various foals with her but liked the lamb more. =)

Yay for new companions! <3 

Bethany's Favorite Art

This is what happens when it snows while trees are still dumping their leaves:

While I appreciate nature's enthusiasm for the Christmas season, even I think it's rather overeager this year. It reminds me of stores, always rushing from straight from Halloween to Christmas decor without pause for Thanksgiving.

It seems a bit odd to still be discussing art from a fall competition, but I'm going to do it anyway!

Jesus

(The artist is posing with his painting here - he's not part of it.)

This incredible oil painting drew lots of people's attention at ArtPrize. Nobody living knows what Jesus looks like, yet I think nearly everybody would know who this was supposed to be even if it wasn't titled. I find the various artistic renderings of Jesus fascinating, and I think this artist did an amazing job. His painting style is superb, from the meticulously detailed face to the flowy/ smoky effect on his head covering. Mom said that while walking around and viewing Jesus at various distances and angles, his eyes seemed always to be looking right at her. 

Watchin' me, watchin' you

I was drawn to this first of all because it reminds me of our neighborhood deer, which often stroll around in broad daylight. (We know this all too well: Nala goes ballistic any time she catches sight of them.) The deer and forest depicted here are actually ones the artist observed while hiking in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I assume she took a photo and used this as the reference for this pen and ink masterpiece. She's captured the detail of the trees (how can anyone have the patience for all those tiny needles?!) and the complex shadows beautifully. 

Monster Menagerie
Several entries this year depicted not-so-scary monsters. Monsters Go was back again, where the artist used kids' monster drawings as inspiration for his own illustrations. As much as I like them, I also really appreciated this other artist's imagined monsters. He has been using ink and watercolor to create one monster a day for the past 5 years. He displayed a collection of 50 of his favorites for ArtPrize.

According to Mom, the 50 little creations were neatly organized on the 4 sides of a large supportive pillar. Here's one side of it: 

And here are a few close-ups of my favorites:

Michigan Monsters

Waffle Monster

Boulder Monster

Beachball Monster

Dare to Dream Big

I don't really think this one needs much explanation. As you can see from the posing artist, these bronze sculptures are quite large. And they were ok to touch, which people were quite eager to do.

The artist's inspiration was his cat Grayboy, who really does seem to think he's a lion. Here he is posing with a scaled-down model of the sculpture:

Amethyst Awakening
Last but definitely not least is this spectacular mixed media entry of a tranquil lakeshore. This acrylic painting has amethyst crystals embedded all over it, with the largest and thickest chunks at the bottom, obviously.

They give it incredible texture and sparkle.

I found the artist's explanation of this entry quite interesting too, so here it is:

Way to think outside the box, Gina. I'd love to see some of her other creations.

That's it for the ArtPrize posts for this decade! We hope you enjoyed them as much as we enjoyed putting them together. 

Unfortunately, I'm out of time for today, but there are a couple of HI2-themed posts in the works! Until later!

Felicity's Favorite Art

I intended to post about my favorite entries from ArtPrize in the week leading up to Halloween, since they sort of have a Halloween-y vibe. The big day came and went before I got around to writing anything, however, and it would have been totally lame to post the photos by themselves without explanation. So let's all just pretend it's still October for a few minutes, okay? The turkeys can wait.

The Voyage

Isn't the style of this oil painting awesome? I love the contrast of the crisply detailed ship to its artistically blurred surroundings. The ship seems old, worn, and spooky. The muted color palette, shadowy undertones, enveloping clouds, and the bold dark frame add to the effect.

Black Panther

The same artist who created the silk-embroidery-on-silk owl last year was back again this year with this black panther lurking behind a tree. It is every bit as impressive as the owl, too: it has the same intricate detail and sheen. She's captured the velvety texture of the panther's fur perfectly, and the whiskers look incredibly real too. 

This next photo gives you an idea of the size of the panther. How she can make any sense of all those threads I can't begin to understand.

DARK TREES
This entry was a short black and white film. I wish I could share a link to it so you could see it for yourself, but unfortunately I can't find it anywhere online. So, you'll have to settle for my description of it and a few frames from the ArtPrize website to illustrate.

This film was being projected on two separate screens in a dark room on a low floor of a big old brick building - a building a lot like the one in the film itself. One screen continuously showed shots of leafless trees casting shadows on the outside of the building. 

On the other screen on the opposite wall was a man wandering around inside the building, which is oppressively dark and empty. The man sometimes seems to be trying to find a way out and sometimes more fleeing from mysterious sounds within the building. He strides down long hallways, 

ascends and descends staircases and ladders, finds himself in the basement 

and on the roof, but no matter what he tries or where he goes, he can't get out of the building. The doors are always too securely locked, and the windows  are always out of reach.

Things sometimes get confusing, with the man ascending a ladder and finding himself in the basement, for instance. The screen showing the tree shadows and the screen showing the man in the building would switch every so often too, so the viewers had to keep shifting where they were looking to follow the action. All this and the dark instrumental music playing in the background gave this film a nightmarish quality. And in case you were wondering, the poor guy never does get out. The film is on a seamless loop.

Vanishing

This entry is a series of acrylic paintings on sand and canvas. The subjects are endangered animals, species that are vanishing in the wild due to human-caused issues like climate change and poaching. To illustrate the vanishing part, the artist has included additional faint, ghost-like images of the animals in the background. My favorite ones were the leopards, as I thought it was really cool how the ghost versions blend in so well with the rocks.

Abiding in the Shadow

This installation's paper mountain may leave much to be desired, especially when you compare it to the ritzy hotel scenery around it. At least the barbed wire deer and wolf sculptures, the stars of this anyway, stand out nicely against the light color. Looking at this at first, I was all bummed out: 5 wolves closing in on that poor deer. He seems as doomed as the dude trapped in the building.

Or maybe not? According to the artist's blurb, the deer may make it through this after all. He has speed, strength, and endurance, and sharp antlers and hooves. He's still a formidable adversary for the wolves, as the big shadow he's casting is supposed to illustrate. Likewise, this artist's point with this is that all is not necessarily lost when "wolves bear down on us" in this life, not when we're abiding in the shadow of our inner strength.

Okay, that's enough not-so-cheerful-ness for one weekend. Time to go back and talk about HI2 a bit before I go.

Halloween on HI2 was short and sweet for us, since we didn't have much time after school to play before the humans all left and the doll Halloween party began in the basement. 

Our fluted wild of the day was appropriately ghostly, though:

Too bad about his stats. It would've been fun to have a ghostly caught-on-Halloween horse in the herd. Oh well, staying with us and our hoard of horses would probably have been too scary for him anyway.

Like it or not, it really is November already now! We've still only captured one +6/6 wild horse this year. Wow. Are we pathetic or what?

Thanks to Bethany's persistent livery stalking, our herd may have finally increased by one more +80 horse anyway. Check out this mare that she found on Thursday night:

Her color may not be that interesting, but I think her stats, stately pose, and her markings make her anything but ordinary.