Our judges had a lot to talk about during the last live critiques! If you missed it, now you can watch it in the video subscription 🎬

Every month, we do a live event we like to call Critique Arena, where we critique selected entries and pick the winners of our monthly art contest. Even if you didn’t enter the contest, you can still learn a lot from hearing “alternative takes” on how to approach an illustration!

During the last Critique Arena on Jan 16, Jake Parker and Will Terry critiqued the top 16 entries in our December art contest.

The prompt was “...as she listened closely, she overheard them talking about her...”. 😩😭😤 It was a tough one! The idea was explore complex human emotion. It’s just too easy to make all your characters generically happy, especially if you are a kidlit artist!

We started with the top 16 competitors, and did successive rounds of judging where the audience voted to get to the final four. Then Jake and Will picked one of the top two, but put the final one to a vote because they just couldn’t choose!

Check out Jake and Will talking about the December contest entries!