Competitions: Winning Or Taking Part?

If you have a prolific young artist in your family or an occassional artist who likes to work to one specific brief, we have an opportunity for you: enter our monthly Binky Picture Competition. As the entries for our current competition trickle in at a steady pace, ahead of 15th of the month deadline, I started to think about why we had decided to run monthly picture competitions in the first place.

Our first competition was back in November and Daisy from Southampton, aged just 4 ½ was our first winner. We sent Daisy a certificate with a copy of her picture featured in it, wrapped in an envelope addressed to her, along with her prize. Her mum told us how delighted Daisy was to find her big envelope next to her cereal bowl at breakfast and that her certificate is now displayed with pride on the fridge door.

Backtrack a couple of weeks: the entries came in as photos and by email, we placed the photos of the various works of art into our gallery on Facebook and then our Facebook fans voted and commented about all the pictures. Finally after totting up the votes, we had our winner.

Is it about winning competitions or about taking part?

When we came up with the idea of competitions we wanted them to offer more than a prize to one lucky winner. We didn’t want our competitions to be one of those processes where you make a lot of effort with the odds of any reward firmly stacked against you. So our competitions are mostly about taking part and it is about getting a slice of the limelight even though you might not be the one and only winner.

We have a family memory box and in that box is a painting I did when I was 6. It’s of an Indian Chief. It was part of a competition at a holiday play camp; everyone painted a picture and all the pictures were displayed on a long wall. I didn’t win but I can still remember the pride I felt to see my picture up on the wall. And that picture came off the wall and went into our family memory box (a huge chocolate box) along with other works of art by my sister and brother.

We want all the children whose pictures are sent in to feel proud when they see them up in our Facebook gallery and we hope the mums and dads, grannies and grandads who send the photos in will feel proud of what their child has produced.

Our Binky Gallery on Facebook

There will be one winner, it’s a competition after all but as we start to put all the entries into our Binky Gallery we are noticing the different drawing and colouring styles, the quirky elements of each individual child’s take on similar subjects: teddy bears, Christmas things, family members’ portraits and we can’t help feeling a little wave of joy as we know that for a few days, these young artists will have their works of art on public view and they can get their friends and family to come along and enjoy them too.

From the reaction so far we know that our competition has struck a chord with many of you and if you have a young artist who would like to take part, there is still time. You probably have a steady flow of artwork coming back from school so just ask your child which one they would like to enter, take a photo of it on your smartphone and email it to us at binky@binkybear.co.uk with the first name and age of the artist. We will email you when our gallery goes live on our Facebook page and one talented artist will win a lovely Binky prize and all of you will have had some limelight to share with your family and friends.

Please forward this blog post to anyone you think will also be interested. We will be running our Binky Picture Competition every month and everyone is welcome to enter.