Competition Call for Illustrators

My husband is a copublisher of a German literature magazine called „spa_tien". The print & online magazine appears twice yearly. The publishers are currently preparing a paperback book under the working title "was sind literarische weblogs?" ("what are literary weblogs?"). The book is scheduled for the 1st quarter of 2008.

„What are literary weblogs“ – this is the working title. Why do we want to publish this book? We want to present the phenomenon of literary weblogs – still a niche within the blogosphere – to a wider non-blogging and not blog-reading audience that is up to now mostly interested in traditional ways of literature publication. Additionally we want to (re-)initiate a discussion about online literature, a phenomenon that is not as widely known in Europe as e. g. in the US and offers – especially in the form of the weblog – new and interesting ways of creative writing in a great variety of fashions.

Different authors of literary weblogs will contribute their essays and sample posts for this book for free. In a way this is a community project comparable to open source software developments. The participants participate because it pleases them and because they think what they do might be of value and importance for somebody.

We are men (and women) of the word and cannot illustrate a book like this ourselves. That’s why we are looking for an artist who would be pleased to be part of this community project and has the ideas and skills for interesting illustrations. The general topic could be freely interpreted. It may be a play with associations about web-like structures. It may be variants of untraditional text representations. It could be abstract or ornamental as well.
A series of about 7 to 9 images could also illustrate motives about literature, text, weblogs, writing processes, etc.

Requirements:

• The participants should send in 2 images to show the character of the series. These two images will be rated and the winner will do the whole series of 7 – 9 pics. The illustrations, graphics, sketches, etc. have to be black & white or in grey scales with a size of approx. 350 x 175 px (Width/Lenght). For the print version the image must have a resolution of 300 dpi and the required aspect ratio of 350 x 175 px.
• Deadline: July 31, 2007
• Please send the images to this address !
  

Reward for the winner:

• His/her work will be published in a book (with a short biography and link to his/her webpage)
• A copy of the published book
• Gratefulness from the publishers and the contributing authors as well
• The artist retains the copyright on all the images and they will be only used for this project
  

Everybody can join the contest – pros and amateurs. It may be specially interesting for amateurs or illustrators who are just beginning their career.
I´ll post the entries here with a link to the artists blogs. Further all entries with a link to participant´s website/blog will be shown here on flickr!

Have fun and be creative!


Publishers of spa_tien:
Hartmut Abendschein
Markus A. Hediger
Benjamin Stein
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While I really do understand the artists who don´t want to do this kind of Pro Bono work, I still like the idea
of this project and personally I do like participating in these kind of c0ntests.
If you feel the need to discuss Pro Bono work, then please do so in the next post (Note from the publishers).
But I´m not going to explain my point of view again and again. _____________________________________________________________

Thanks to all of you, for your suggestions where I could post about the contest and for linking to this page:
Tommy Kane
Teesha Moore
Justin Monson
Suzanne Buchanan
Karen Winters
Christine Castro Hughes
Rama Hughes
Penelope Dullaghan