Happy Clock Day everyone! Today we're celebrating 18 years since @StrawberryClock got B through the Portal. The shock of B passing judgment gave rise to the Clock Crew and movies like this. Since then, B has been screened as part of an NG retrospective at the Animation Breakdown Festival in LA, the Ottawa International Animation Festival and the GLAS Animation Festival in Berkeley.
Speaking of which, GLAS Animation Next is coming to Philly and I’ll be introducing the screening at PhilaMOCA on September 29th!
Sprite Draw Winners
This month we hosted a SpriteDraw Art Contest, to promote the fun SpriteDraw tool by @idrawbutts. This contest received a ton of imaginative entries and it was really difficult to pick our top three. In the end we tried to go with the ones that delighted us the most when comparing the source sprite to the final character design.
Three Faves ($20 each)
We enjoyed all of the entries by @Knickinator, who is receiving a year of honorary Supporter status. These three pieces all came up in the judging process:
We’re also giving each of these runner-ups a month of honorary Supporter status if they don’t already have it:
Thank you @JohnnyUtah, @Sabtastic, @IvanAlmighty and @PhantomArcade for help with judging, although our lists were all very different, making this a tough one!
Shout out to @Sabtastic for being an early SpriteDraw adopter and encouraging others to give it a try with this phenomenal piece:
Congrats to the winners and thank you everyone who participated!
NEAR DEADline Art Contest
NEAR DEADline is a new game by @NickConter, @BrandyBuizel @Carmet and they are hosting an art contest here on NG!
NEAR DEADline has a drawing tool built into the title screen and the contest is to draw something and share it in this thread. Three winners will receive a year of honorary Supporter status!
Other Contests
There is also a Music Inspired Art contest in progress and a contest to Illustrate Characters for the winning story entry in our OG NG Character Writing Contest.
Musicians: Check out the Remix Contest!
Support Goals
Speaking of which, NG is 209 Supporters away from removing all ads from E-M art view pages for (at least) the remainder of 2019! The goal for this milestone is 2,750 active supporters on the Wall of Honor.
If Newgrounds could achieve 4,000 active supporters by the end of 2019 it would be a huge help in 2020, after a year of rising hosting costs. I know 4k isn’t realistic but we’ll take what we can get and hope for the best. Be mindful that additional support will always improve NG’s long-term prospects.
A lot of us saw this week is that Yahoo-parent Verizon sold Tumblr for under $3 million, six years after Yahoo paid $1 billion for it. People are joking about how they could have raised enough money to buy it themselves but keep in mind Tumblr is retaining 200 employees. The new owners will likely spend over $1 million per month to keep Tumblr running. Newgrounds might not be as big as Tumblr but I think we’re doing a pretty good job, given our resources!
I also learned this past week that ByteDance, the owners of Tik Tok, spent $1 billion advertising Tik Tok in 2018. It’s crazy when you consider the money being spent by these platforms and I hope it makes supporting Newgrounds for $3 a month sound totally reasonable. Newgrounds is 100% independent, has been a consistent home to artists for over 20 years and isn’t doing weird things with your personal data. We don’t even want to run ads and with a little luck we won’t need to some day.
So there’s my pitch for today! Please consider becoming a Supporter!