Background

As many of you will know, this group, NaNoEmo hosts a fun emote-a-day style challenge every November to match up with NaNoWriMo in the literature community. Over the last few years we have had a fair number of emoticonists taking part and some fantastic emotes appearing all through the designated month.

Whilst this is great for creating smaller or ‘chat friendly’ emotes, it is far harder to work on larger canvases in the given time scale. Although there is nothing stopping artists working emotes every day and  producing a smaller quantity of emotes, the majority of participants opt for the more traditional approach of 30 emotes in 30 days.

Mirz123 and myself have therefore decided to one again run a separate event in the month of August (though we've hosted it in June/July in the past), known as VP NaNoEmo, designed specifically for Visual Purpose (VP) emotes.

The Challenge

The challenge of VP NaNoEmo is to ideally create one emote a week -- or if you can't quite manage that, four emotes by the end of August.The emote should be geared towards the Visual Purpose branch of the gallery - emotes which are designed solely to look at and generally feature a larger canvas and background. Some examples include:


If you are unable to make one every week, then don’t sweat it. The goal is to make more emotes than you usually would and possibly even try new styles and techniques you have never used before. If you want to take part and only make 2 emotes then that’s better than none. Equally there is no shame in making more than 1 emote a week if you feel up to it!

For those who are new to this branch of the art form, don’t think you have to go big. VP emotes come in all shapes and sizes and can be as small as 50x50 pixels if you wish. Avatars are also valid VP emotes, and a great way to work on a Visual Purpose emote on a smaller scale. The main aim to make emotes designed to look at rather than use in conversation, so don’t think you have to fill a massive canvas straight away.

Taking Part

If you aim to take part in VP NaNoEmo then join the group and leave a comment on the journal below. We’ll add you to the list of participants so others can check your emote(s) each week. Once you have finished your emote(s) each week, upload them to the 'featured' folder at NaNoEmo so other group members to check them out. At the end of the week/fortnight/month we will also create a news article to show off a range of the brilliant pieces made.

You don’t have to take part in the entire month. So if for any reason you want to sign up part way through July or need to drop out, then that is ok. We will edit the list throughout the month to help keep it as up to date as possible.

Emotes made for VP NaNoEmo can also be entered into other contests/events such as ChallengEmotes giving you exciting themes to base your entries on. VP NaNoEmo simply aims to get people making VP emotes over the summer, so we have no issue with these doubling up as contest entries elsewhere.

Tutorials + Resources

For those that may not have much experience with Visual Purpose Emotes, Emotication has a handy list of tutorials and resources which may assist making your art pieces.

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It would be brilliant if you could help spread the word about this new event. We would love to see members throughout the community (and even beyond) taking part, so please help promote it through journals, polls, Twitter or simply show it to your friends.

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Hope to see some wonderful emotes come through the gallery this year. I will personally be participating and hope it inspires me to emote beyond that.

Participants:

CassidyPeterson
Web5teR