Art competition: Wildlife Artist of the Year

This is a quick reminder for anybody who missed this in yesterday's post.

The deadline for submission of artwork to the Wildlife Artist of the Year 2010 award has been extended and is now Sunday 31st January 2010.


The title Wildlife Artist of the Year is awarded by a panel of judges appointed by the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation (DSWF) and comes with a cash prize of £10,000 generously donated by the exhibition sponsors and handed out by a well known celebrity!

Wildlife Artist of the Year 2009
Sir Michael Parkinson, David Shepherd CBE and David Gower in front of the winning picture
photograph Rebecca Thomas

Who can enter?

WAY is open to:

• artists from all over the world
• amateur and professional artists alike (WAY does not distinguish between them)
• individual entrants aged 17 years or over (ie you must be 17 by the closing date - 31st Jan 2010.)
  

What sort of work is admissable?

Admissable work includes:

• any medium in any style (but see exceptions below)
• accepted media: oil, acrylic, watercolour, pencil, mixed media, bronze, plaster, wire, collage, traditional, abstract, black & white
• multiple entries from one artist (plus applicable fee)
  

Inadmissable work includes:

• work which is not original
  
• work which has been sold
• pre-published images (ie your artwork cannot have been published as a print – open or limited edition)
  
• artwork in photography
  
• artwork as film
• electronically created artwork (my personal interpretation of this is all artwork which has used digital means in some way to achieve the end result)
  
• any artwork that you completed before 15th January 2005

Note also that the rules and conditions indicate that Artists using exact reference from another professional artist or photographer risk having their work marked down.

Five categories

There are five categories. My impression from visiting the exhibition last summer (see Exhibition review: Wildlife Artist of the Year 2009) was that a lot of submissions relate to the endangered wildlife category.

• Endangered Wildlife: Any wild animal or plant that is threatened or endangered nationally or internationally.
• Wild Place: Any scene or landscape showing the natural environment at its wildest, most beautiful or dramatic.
• Wildlife in 3D: Any sculpture in any medium.
• Wildlife in Action: Any wild animal jumping, fighting, flying or showing any other interesting behaviour.
• Open: Let your imagination run wild!
  

How to enter

You can obtain the details from the website. There is a page for the Wildlife Artist of the Year 2010 competition

Here you can obtain:

• rules and conditions (pdf file)
• postal entry form (pdf file)
  
• the answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs pdf file)

You do NOT submit original artwork. You submit a photograph or digital image

• either by post (eg as print or file on CD) using the 'postal entry form'
• If you have an electronic image of your artwork (J-Peg for pc file), we encourage you to follow the
  
• or by submitting a jpeg via the on-line entry process on www.wildlifeartistoftheyear.org The file size must be no larger than 7MB. All files must have an easily identifiable name eg surname followed by the title of the artwork (smithlions.jpeg)
  

So - although there are only four days left, you still have plenty of time to submit an entry online!

Wildlife Artist of the Year 2009 - Private View, Mall Galleries

You can check out which submissions were successful last year by looking at the online exhibition - see Wildlife Artist of the Year 2009 - the online exhibition