Halloween 2018 Fanart Contest

You're walking in the woods. There's no one around, and your phone is dead. Out of the corner of your eye, you spot it - another osu! Halloween-themed Fanart Contest. Oh no! Draw for your life, and sweet prizes!

It's that time of year again - brandish your drawing implement of choice and show us your most devilishly spooky rendition of any osu! mascot (official or community) in a distinctly Halloween-themed piece for thrills, chills, and loot to boot!

Those brave enough to enter the fray will have 14 days to muster their best work to present to the osu! community in a week-long session of ridiculously difficult voting, as is the norm for our fanart contests at this point.

The top selection of entries (anywhere from 8 to 15 depending on turnout) will award their artists 2 months of osu!supporter, and the winning pieces will all feature as the Halloween seasonal main-menu backgrounds!

Think you can stand up to the spook? Read the RULES below carefully, then head over to the contest listing and submit your work!

Rules

• All entries MUST be OBVIOUSLY HALLOWEEN THEMED in some way. How you pull this off is entirely up to you, but people should take a look at your work and be clued in almost straight away that it's horror/Halloween related.
• All entries must be suitable for all-ages viewing. The best kind of Halloween is the kind that is spooky without being just a gore-filled bloodbath or full of other similarly confronting material. Besides, our mascots are as cute as buttons, do you really want to torment them so?
• Artists should use the custom templates provided (PSD template / PNG template) when composing their piece as a guideline to understand where the osu! cookie will be placed on the main menu and during the voting process. New to these contests or not, these templates still seem to confuse people time after time. Use them to figure out where we'll overlay the osu! cookie during the voting process (and where it'll be if it gets to the main menu) - anything you draw behind the central circle WILL NOT be seen by voters, so keep that in mind!
• WHEN USING THE TEMPLATE SUPPLIED ABOVE, DO NOT LEAVE IT VISIBLE IN YOUR SUBMISSION! There is nothing more horrifying than having an angry, muscled seagull bursting into your PMs and asking you why you left the template in your piece. Don't do it!
• Entries MUST meet the resolution requirements for a main-menu piece - namely 2732x1536. Don't half-size, don't submit things in weird dimensions that aren't specified, submit them in 2732x1536 or not at all! 1366x768 is BAAAAAD since the game client uses 2732x1536 to display the winning background entries, and we have been forced to scale up entries in the past. Your work deserves better!
• SUBMIT ONLY YOUR OWN WORK! NO TRACING! NO REDRAWING! NO COMPOSITE WORKS! Repurposing other people's pre-drawn works to make them look like osu! mascots is just plagiarism, straight up. Don't do it. Using brushes and things like that is fine. Have some respect for yourself and the work of others!
• Don't use copyrighted characters from other intellectual properties. You can freely use any of the osu! mascots (pippi, Yuzu, Mocha, Maria) and any of the community mascots (Tama, Aiko, Taikonator, so on), but stay away from using direct representations of characters from other worlds or franchises in your work. Remember that the community mascots are also someone else's creation, so make sure to treat their work with the same respect that you'd treat yours.

If you don't follow these rules, you'll be forever cursed with bad calcium. Now that you understand what's what, get drawing and submit your entry over at the contest listing page!

—Ephemeral