Winter 2019 Fanart Contest

The end of the year is rapidly approaching, and while things might be cooling down where you are (or maybe not), the artist's battlefield is just as fiery as ever!

Do you like to draw? Great, because we've got just the contest for you!

Draw any of the osu! mascots (official or community) in a winter-themed piece and you'll have a shot at getting your work showcased in the game's main menu as a part of our Winter 2019 Seasonal Background pack!

The hard-fought finalists will also nab themselves a few months of osu!supporter (the exact amount yet to be determined), and a selection of three finalists will receive an extra shiny profile badge showcasing their work!

You might be wondering, these are new prizes, what gives? The season of giving gives, that's what! Most importantly, we've heard your feedback on the prizes for the winning artists crystal clear, and we're willing to try something out a little different this time around to see how it pans out.

Think you're up for the challenge? You've got 20 days from RIGHT NOW to get your concept onto paper and into your computer, then in to our contest system. As always, the community will be forced to make many impossible choices with far too many votes to help us decide which ones will be our final entries.

Make sure you read the rules below before you enter, even if you've done this before, since there's a few new ones this time around!

Rules

• All entries MUST be winter themed and feature one (or more) of the osu! mascots (either official or community). Cold, Christmas, mountains or whatever else, just make sure that it is really obviously winter at a glance for most of the world and that a mascot we know and love is featured in it. Any lonesome Dons will find themselves figuratively and literally out in the cold this year.
• All entries must be suitable for all-ages viewing. Our mascots are pure and innocent and would never be wrapped up in nothing but ribbons and put under a festive tree. Someone might have done this a few years back and we had to pull their entry because of it — YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE! Keep it clean.
• Attribution (artist names, Twitter handles and other things like pixiv links, socials, etc) can be included in your entry, but must be situated either on the bottom left, or bottom right of your entry, and must not be overly large. We're not going to judge this one too hard in terms of size, but please don't make them massive. People have been including attribution links in their entries for a while now and we figured we may as well formalize them loosely at this point, just make sure they're not like, gigantic. Anything taller than 300 pixels in height is probably too big. We want your art to shine foremost, and this kind of stuff does influence the voting a little more than we'd like, but we can't exactly ask you to not take credit for your own work, could we?
• 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. Anything inside the dotted circle will NOT be visible during voting phase, and will be heavily obscured by the main menu cookie if it makes it to the game client.
• DO NOT LEAVE THE DOTTED osu! COOKIE TEMPLATE VISIBLE IN YOUR SUBMISSION! Please don't do this. It doesn't need to be there when you're done drawing, it just makes your work look worse.
• ACCOUNT FOR THE DOTTED osu! COOKIE TEMPLATE IN THE COMPOSITION OF YOUR WORK! We've already said this, but anything inside the dotted circle will not be seen during voting phase and will be very difficult to see on the main menu. You still need to draw something there — don't just leave it blank, but be creative about it. Check out previous contest entries for inspiration!
• MAKE SURE YOU DON'T HAVE THE DOTTED osu! COOKIE TEMPLATE VISIBLE IN YOUR WORK! What's this, the same rule repeated three times in three slightly different ways? What could this POSSIBLY MEAN? If you're not following, it means to TRIPLE CHECK that you've not left the template visible in your work.
• Entries MUST meet the resolution requirements for a main-menu piece — namely 2732x1536. THIS IS CHECKED BY A SCRIPT AND ENTRIES THAT DO NOT MATCH THIS REQUIREMENT WILL BE DISCARDED AUTOMATICALLY. Just in case you missed it, a script automatically discards entries that don't meet the resolution requirements, even if they're off by only a few pixels. This is the #1 reason why people don't see their artwork in the end voting, and many excellent entries have met this tragic, tragic fate. Export your entry at the proper size!
• SUBMIT ONLY YOUR OWN WORK! NO TRACING! NO REDRAWING! NO COMPOSITE WORKS! Just don't plagarize. Don't rip off doujin/manga stills, don't redraw characters, don't do anything that isn't your own work and creativity taking the fore. This contest is about YOUR skill, not how well you can pass off someone else's work at your own. You will be permanently banned from future fanart contests if you are caught doing this!
• 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, any of the submissions from the Most Manic Art contest also apply), 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.

Got all that?

Head over to the Winter Fanart Contest listing and enter now!

—Ephemeral