Ego is a terrible thing.
I am relating this story here because telling you
people is cheaper than telling it to a psychiatrist.
Each year during the summer a group of us buy beach
badges at the New Jersey shore. We basically live there.
One of my friends is in the same employment circumstance as
myself and goes with me during the week when most of you are toiling
in the fields. My friend is a painter. Watercolor mostly.
Awhile ago I talked him into trying his hand at computer art and he
has purchased Corel Painter 9 and Adobe Illustrator 10.
No Zbrush yet, but I am working on him. A few pieces of his work has been sold,
much to his surprise and my distress.
I have a few pieces of software myself, Maya 6, Carrara 5, Zbrush, Adobe Photoshop and a few more.
In any case, at this particular beach last year, a contest was announced.
You were to submit a design for this year’s beach badge. The winner got
his design used on the badge and the season free.
Challenge.
I ask you now to look at the software mentioned above.
Impressive right?
Between us we can handle any work.
For the week after the contest was announced we went our separate ways
and worked on the contest piece. As you might guess when my friend asked
me how long I was spending, the reply he got was “a few minutes."
Sure.
Now, another friend of ours has access to printers that would do justice
to any computer work. Commercial quality.
We went to him and he obliged us by printing up our entries.
Between the quality of the printing job and our efforts, we had two
good entries. We took them to the beach office and filled out the forms.
The woman that took the entries oooowed and awwwed!
We are in!!
The days passed. No phone call. No letter. No email.
After about two weeks, we asked when the results would be announced.
We were told the winner had been notified and the contest was over.
We asked about the winning entry and were told they had no more details.
Ok. We lost no big deal.
We have purchased this years beach badges and basically had forgotten the contest.
Until this morning.
I ran into the woman that took our entries last year. We got to talking and she asked
me if I would like to see the artist. I said sure.
Drum roll please.
The artist is five years old; she was four when she created the winning entry.
By smearing a piece of paper with three colors. Blue, sand color and yellow for the sun
She did it with her fingers in less than two minutes.
I thought of this while I was reading an article here about how an artist lost
the CG challenge.
Know exactly how he feels.
We were robbed.
