We completed the monthly art contest for June 2023. The winner was @Deas and the 1st runner up was @ArtTrooper. Congratulations to everyone who participated and submitted wonderful art, and also to our members who voted for the entries.
And now It’s time to announce the monthly art challenge for July 2023. @Deas was unavailable and ceded the topic naming honour to @ArtTrooper who has come up with an interesting topic for this month.
Monthly Art Challenge – July 2023 – Topic: Yin and Yang
Details:
The idea is that you draw or paint something opposite and somehow connected.
You should be using complimentary color palette in a way that one side of the palette represents yin and the other represents yang.
It can be in any style. Stick to your usual art style or try something new. It’s up to you. Be creative!
Rules
The concept and idea for the artwork should your own and not an exact copy from someone or somewhere else.
Artwork should be done in Krita. Submissions must be done from scratch in Krita, no paint-over or tracing allowed. Photobashing is allowed only when explicitly specified in the topic.
The topic changes every month. Your submission should be somehow related to the topic. And if possible please add a few lines explaining your idea and image.
No AI-generated images are allowed, not even partial use of AI and paint over. It is unfair for those who are drawing from scratch.
You can post maximum 3 entries and also edit the entries until the deadline. All your entries will be clubbed during the vote and you only get one vote. Reply with your entries to this post in this thread.
In order to have the image featured, the entries need to be safe for work so please avoid any NSFW or controversial content. The moderators can use their discretion to disqualify the image from the contest with prior notice. Of course the artist will be given the chance to submit an alternate image or change it.
The submission will be open until 2023-07-28T00:00:00Z. The topic will be automatically closed and you can check how much time is left at the bottom of the thread.
We will hold a poll at the end from 2023-07-28T00:00:00Z to 2023-07-30T00:00:00Z. The artwork with the most votes will be the winner.
Prize
The winner(s) be featured on this website in the featured row.
The winner(s) will have the privilege to set the topic of their liking. If the winner is not available or reachable then the 1st runner up will be asked to provide the topic and challenge
Also please spread the word about this contest by posting your artwork on various social media websites with a hashtag - #kritachallenge , if possible with a link to the forum post.
I hope we will enjoy this exercise so let us begin.
**P.S. Note we can change the rules based on the feedback on this contest and modify the format. Any suggestions are welcome. We can make a new topic in the Site Feedback category for it. Please post only artworks and discussion related to them in this thread.
Note : We have changed the name from Monthly Art Contest to Monthly Art Challenge as it is more of a challenge for learning together rather than a contest, even if there is an award.
For my entry I went for an odd approach and maybe an explanation is due. The colour palettes are complementary as per the rules but the subject are these two guinea pigs I have that tend to snuggle up with eachother in a Ying-Yang shape. Then I noticed their furs are opposite. short and coarse vs long and sleek. Their personalities are opposing too but I didn’t really work it in more than the northly one is more relaxed and thus sleeps with his eyes closed and has the ‘cool’ colour whilst the southerly one is more anxious, sleeping with his eyes open and has the ‘warm’, more active colour. They are two opposites but yet are still guinea pigs.
I was actually looking at my previous work for inspiration and DragonBird was it! A dragon and a bird wing turned out nicely for me! (*I did a slight edit from the original post, adding a thicker black and a yellow outline around the emblem and a couple of yellow cloud highlights. Hope nobody minds.)
Thank you so much! I second guess myself on things a lot, and wasn’t quite sure if the background detracted from the emblem, but wanted to stick with the same palette.
OK, as soon as I read the subject for this month, it made me think of the Disney Fantasia Fairies flying around waking up the different seasons and dousing flowers in glitter and sparkles. So I did something along those lines for this challenge: Day and night. And I’m pretty pleased with how the sparkles have turned out on digital.
So I used the gamut mask with the oval on one side and a little accent colour circle on the opposite side, and then swapped it round for the other side of the picture. I did opposite colour accents in the middle of the flowers to represent the opposite colour circles in the original Ying/Yang symbol.
I tried a few different backgrounds but found them to distract from the main event so left it plain black in the end.
I’m not sure if my drawing follows the rules of the topic, hope so!
I made an outwards version of the yin yang symbol and tried to keep the complementary colors separate except for the plane and the dragon which I drew in opposite colors (and in opposite position ) as if they were the two dots of the symbol.
It was a bit far fetched and not any good design on the matter so that’s why I removed it. Sometimes you have to be reminded by fellow artists when walking astray blindfolded.
This month’s topic really gave my paltry creativity a workout! After sketching and redrawing this piece several times, I finally settled on a Yin Yang design containing several opposites in color and subject. I painted it in a detailed mucha art style since it seemed fitting for this kind of design. I discovered the bevel-emboss tool in Layer Styles with this piece. What a cool drawing tool! I did the tree branches with it. Artwork revised 7/22
) as if they were the two dots of the symbol.
One might argue that China is belching out more factory smog than the west though. 
Not sure who should be judging that, definitely not one random commenter.