THE "TYRANTS OF PAINTING" ARE BACK!
"What is it?"
MFXTOP is a monthly Malifaux single miniature painting competition held on here and using the power of social media, more specifically Twitter, to increase the entries, encouragement and also determine a winner.
Each month a theme will be set for which type of miniature you can enter into the month’s competition.
Each month, you can make your entry by simply taking a photo of your work, logging into twitter (if you don’t have an account you are missing out) and tweeting
@ArcaneReservoier with the photo and the hashtag
#MFXTOP
Please check the hashtag to see other entries, give critique and encourage eachother.
After three weeks of competition entries, I (Ben Sime) will pick my top four which will go to a public vote.
More on this in a bit.
"How will you pick the four?"
Obviously one person picking the four to go through to public voting may seem unfair, bias almost and in a sense it will be, however I am going to use a judging system that everyone can read here and know what I will be looking for.
- Pure Brush Skill: If I look at the model and think I would be unlikely to pull that level of skill off, this will help a lot, the competition is primarily about painting and although other factors will make my final decision this is most important of all.
- Completeness: It's not just the model, it's the basing and also the photos are important. Getting a good picture is hard sometimes, but let's see all the angles. Also this includes how well across you got the theme, maybe you surprised me with a joke who knows?
- Originality: Now if you do paint your models to look just like the art, that is fine and if you have done so extremely well (as mentioned above) this will help. However, I like themes, I like the "rule of cool" and this can strongly influence my choice. Conversions are welcome but not necessary.
- Popularity: This really is arguably the most important choice, if your photos are getting all the Likes and lots of replies saying it's amazing I will either be in agreement or listen to the people.
The safety in the cut-off also is that if you enter a model you painted months ago, I'm likely to know or someone will tell me. If it doesn't remotely fit the theme I don't need to waste anyone's time with it.
Finally if the miniature isn't even yours and you are claiming it is I similarly will probably find out, you cheeky git.
"So who Wins though?"
That is up to the public, well the Twitter based public following along.
Twitter Polls. You've seen them, you love them or hate them but they are a cleaner and faster way for us to set up public voting.
Sure if you have multiple twitter accounts you can semi-fix the poll but anything online can be skewed but it's only just a bit of fun so hopefully nobody wastes too much time trying to ruin it.
The poll itself will go up a few days after the cut-off date so that I can actually have a good look at all the entries and also hopefully gain more public response to the late ones.
The poll will the last 5 days and the results will be announced on Twitter and here, along with the next theme.
"Why should I even bother though?"
The idea of this competition is to be extra incentive for people to paint, try new techniques, raise their game, or even just show off.
The chance to see some fantastic work from lots of different members of the Malifaux community, get ideas, share tips and grow the scene is a wider aim too.
For now, there is no prize for the winner except the knowledge that I and the Tweeting Malifaux scene liked your work the best. In the future I may look to getting a small prize for each month but for now, baby steps.
"Alright then, what is the first theme then so I can get painting?"
Well I'm glad you asked useful subtitle person stuck in my psyche.
Cassandra, Hannah, nah* this isn't just gaming this is the best painted...
HENCHMAN
To qualify the model you paint must be a henchman, doesn't matter the faction, doesn't matter if it was in the AR podcast top 16, just have the Henchman station characteristic.
The first theme is very open but I hope this enough to ease people in.
There we go.
Good luck to everyone who enters.
- Ben (@psientologist)
*Cassandra and Hannah are actually eligible to win, in fact they are very nice models.
