Hey guys, happy hump day (or at least it was when I started this). I just wanted to take this opportunity to talk about art.
ART CAN BASICALLY BE DEFINED AS…no, wait, wrong post. Sorry.
In all seriousness: there are some questions about what, exactly, we’re looking for in our art submissions. Questions which I will now attempt to answer.
The first question is: Are we accepting visual art submissions? To which the answer is: Totally.
The second question: What kind of visual art are we taking? The answer: Everything. If you can put it on a computer, as a .jpeg, and send it to us, send it.
The third question: Do we have a judge/editor who specializes in art? At the moment, No. But man, it’d be cool to get one. Trust us when we say in the meantime that we love art, we’re inspired by art, and we’re open to whatever you want to throw at us.
How will the art be published, as opposed to the writing? You may have noticed that we post images with every update, including this one. These images are largely placeholders until we can get actual artist submissions. If you submit your art, and we accept it, it will be published alongside our story/poem/whatever on that week.
For that reason, we’re going to try to attach writing and art that work together, if not thematically (that would be way too perfect) at least atmospherically. You don’t have to work with the writers to synchronize; we’ll take care of that. And we won’t reject you because your art doesn’t “fit” any of the writing pieces we could attach it to, but we might move its publication date back until we get something that works for it.
Now, I foresee the original thinkers here saying to themselves: “MAN MY ART IS UNIQUE AS HELL. I DON’T NEED IT TIED TO ANY WRITER.” And my response is: One: if that wasn’t actually hyperbolic, chill. Everything will be okay. Two: We know what we’re doing because we’ve done this before. I’ll give an example from our Calliope days:
One of the best stories we accepted was titled CMYK by Dani Neiley, who by now has been published and deserves to be (look her up). It featured a main character that had color synesthesia. When we published the story, we placed it next to an art piece we’d already accepted that had extremely vivid colors. That simple. Your art will still stand on its own, we’ll just put it with writing that complements it.
Oh, and on a not-so-art-related note: In the coming weeks we’ll be mixing it up a bit by publishing pieces by our editors alongside your wonderful works. Some of these will be stories, and we’re planning for one to even be an article. This totally has nothing to do with the number of submissions we’re getting. Honest. (PLEASE SUBMIT THOUGH WE NEED YOU)
I jest. We were prepared for this, so we do have a solid backlog of our own things to put up until you submit. As per usual, our next update will be Monday at Noon. In the meantime: keep creating, everybody.
