{"id":645,"date":"2024-02-07T10:00:17","date_gmt":"2024-02-07T10:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/?p=645"},"modified":"2024-02-07T10:07:11","modified_gmt":"2024-02-07T10:07:11","slug":"juan-hidalgos-painting-competition-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/?p=645","title":{"rendered":"Juan Hidalgo&#8217;s Painting Competition 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of last year I entered an online painting competition run by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@JuanHidalgoMiniatures\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Juan Hidalgo<\/a> on his YouTube channel. We had to take an unpainted or barely started mini, paint it over the course of a couple of months, then send pictures to be judged. I was entering just for fun since I&#8217;ve seen some of the work that is shared on his Discord and Royal Retinue Reviews and there are many that are a shade (or several, several shades) higher than my usual work. My plan was to use this to push myself and go further.<br \/>\nOne of the interesting things about this competition is that it wasn&#8217;t ranking entries against each other; instead there was a set of criteria for Gold, a set for Silver and a set for Bronze. Everyone who hit one of those categories would get a prize and a medal. This also meant that almost every single entry got a medal and the few that didn&#8217;t will be sent prizes anyway, because Juan is lovely.<br \/>\nWe sat up as a family to stay up and watch the results together &#8211; I was confident seeing the Bronze entries that I would at least get in that group. Then the Silvers &#8211; and there were a lot of Silvers &#8211; and as it went on I was mentally comparing&#8230; I might be in that group, there were plenty better than my entry but a few I felt on a level with. Then, as my oldest would say, bingo bongo and my model appeared! One of the last silvers, and the photography was awful (the picture was way smaller than I thought it would be) but there I was in the Silver category. The kids were elated, I was pleased and a little shocked, and the room felt like those adverts where everyone watches football on the telly and The Team scores. I&#8217;d won something! We kept watching through to the end and the Gold entries were really great.<br \/>\nThe feedback I got from the competition was what I could have predicted &#8211; more contrast, some of the small details were a bit flat, and &#8216;a bit more colour in the face&#8217;. Also some better highlighting of the metals (which got praise on their own too). I didn&#8217;t like the digital example provided for the face, but that may be down to the very tiny picture he was working with (and I could just go a little less extreme). Overall it was described as &#8216;nearly a Gold&#8217; which was great &#8211; now I know where to be aiming next year.<br \/>\nI was a little nervous since I was using an unconverted mini with the box-art colour scheme on a very plain base (and a model without eyes, just a happy coincidence that I couldn&#8217;t get them wrong that way!) but overall I was really chuffed with the outcome. I&#8217;ll definitely be entering again if Juan runs one.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"421\" height=\"469\" title=\"20231204_085757\" style=\"display: inline; background-image: none;\" alt=\"20231204_085757\" src=\"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/20231204_085757.jpg\" border=\"0\"><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"293\" height=\"331\" title=\"20231204_085831\" style=\"display: inline; background-image: none;\" alt=\"20231204_085831\" src=\"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/20231204_085831.jpg\" border=\"0\"><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"363\" title=\"20231204_085851\" style=\"display: inline; background-image: none;\" alt=\"20231204_085851\" src=\"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/20231204_085851.jpg\" border=\"0\"><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"290\" height=\"389\" title=\"20231204_085816\" style=\"display: inline; background-image: none;\" alt=\"20231204_085816\" src=\"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/20231204_085816.jpg\" border=\"0\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of last year I entered an online painting competition run by Juan Hidalgo on his YouTube channel. We had to take an unpainted or barely started mini, paint it over the course of a couple of months, then send pictures to be judged. I was entering just for fun since I&#8217;ve seen &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/?p=645\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Juan Hidalgo&#8217;s Painting Competition 2023&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[239,78,111],"series":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":654,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions\/654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=645"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pagan-gerbil.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}