 Hello everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today is going to be a little bit different. Today, we're going to take a look back at Golden Demon 2022 here in the US, talk about what we learned, my own experiences, and hopefully help you if you decide to enter the contest in the future. So, let's get into it. So, it's in the books, as I'm recording this, it's actually been several weeks, which is good. I wanted lots of time to process my thoughts. I know a lot of people made videos right on the heels of it, and those were all great, but for me, it was an interesting experience, and certainly one that I didn't walk away with completely thrilled. That's just when you don't walk away with any trophies, spoiler, I didn't win any demons this year, but that's fine, such as life, you know, isn't a thing that makes you happy, so I wanted plenty of time to think on this, to reflect on my own painting, what I was doing, and how I could do better in the future. Because it is certainly still a contest that I enjoy, that I respect, and that I value the artistry that goes into, and want to do my absolute best for, and so usually that means thinking it through and preparing. So let's talk about my results first. Indulge me just a moment, I promise we'll get to the good stuff. So let's talk about my results. Now I had eight entries. I shared those all with you in a previous video, that's linked up above right now. Of those, three of those, all of them were finalists. I had three of them become commended, which is great. They set up a new tier effectively this year, so they have been using commended entries in the past, but more in a scattered way. This was the first year we saw commended entry as an official level. So you enter, you can make finalists, the next cut above that is commended, and then the final cut is the three winners of the Golden Demons. So I had three of them make it to that category, which I was very happy about. Not the three I was expecting, but that's kind of the nature of the contest. Probably the I was happy with that the piece that I was most sad not to see Bring Home a Demon was, of course, my slanish night, as you saw as you saw in that original video. I was pretty excited about that piece, had put a lot, a lot of work into it over time. And so it was sad to see it not bring home a trophy, but I'm still very proud of what it was all the same. One of the pieces that I created that didn't actually get commended was my dual piece. So this is my shellaxi versus a bloodthirster. And I really enjoyed this piece. It was very try hard. All in all, this is probably 150 to 200 hours of work. I took it multiple places, had it reviewed by different judges, got lots of different feedback, touched it up and touched it up and touched it up all the way to the point where a few days before the before the competition, I was actually removing the figures and reattaching them to sort of change the composition some. So it had a lot of effort put into it. And to see it not make it to Commended was unfortunate. But I learned a lot and we'll talk about that and what I learned from that experience later on, because I do still think the piece has potential and I'm going to keep working on it. So two of their books, you've all seen the winners. But if you weren't there, you didn't see what all of the commended entries. And I do hope in the future they'll take pictures of the commended entries as well and share those out there, not just because some of my pieces would have been shared by a photograph on the site. That would have been cool, but really because there was a lot of really awesome work in the commended entries that didn't get shared out to all of you. And that's a shame other than maybe people taking pictures with their phone or a camera through the glass cases in, you know, not the best lighting. They're not really ideal for sharing people's pieces. And I just would love it if they shared more of the art out there. One of the best things about this contest is how many very cool entries it brings together of, you know, games, workshops, figures. And so I think they should take pictures of all those commended entries and share those out as well. It would just expand not only the number of artists who are happy because they're artists being shared, but also the inspiration out to everybody else for just looking at some really, really cool pieces. So what are the specific lessons I took away from this? Looking at the winners, looking at the commended, looking at the competition, talking to the judges. Well, for me, it really comes down to four main categories. Number one, good painting matters. It matters a lot, but that is a very amorphous term. Good painting, as applied to this particular contest, consists of a certain set of criteria, expectations and so on that I think you need to understand if you're going to compete in this. The Slayer Sword winner of the Skink by Gavin was truly an incredible piece, absolutely deserving of its honors and brilliant, but it is a very specific style. I would call it heavy metal times 200% or something like that. I mean, it is a near flawless, maybe actually flawless paint job, something I don't think I would have ever said before. And it is to be respected, celebrated and highly commended. Gavin is an awesome artist. But it's the, the other thing I noticed about it is that it's not a particular style that they want when you say good painting, but a particular execution. I think some people get the mistaken sort of concept that it has to be heavy metal to win, but that's clearly not true. Look at John Margiata's gold piece in the vehicle. This thing is very far away from anything you'd see on a box art cover or anything heavy metal, and yet it won its category. But the execution here remains the same, and that's the trick. With Golden Demon, what's important isn't the sort of traditional artistic tricks and things like that, as I'll mention later, but instead it's all about that clean execution. What ties Gavin's piece and John's piece together is that both are equally masters of their individual techniques applied extremely cleanly, efficiently and over the whole piece. And that leads us to number two, clean technical painting. Now I don't mean clean like the model looks clean. The aforementioned knight is certainly not clean. Sam Lenz's Gasgul Thracke is certainly not clean. He's rusty, he's beat up, he's scuffed and scarred, as would befit, the orc leader of such a massive war. But it is technically executed all over the piece down to every tiny detail to the same level, and that is all done very cleanly. That is the important part to understand here. When you're doing your highlights, your styles, your shades, your applications, your weathering, it has to be evenly, efficiently and effectively distributed around the entire miniature. So weathering by realism isn't really important, or quote unquote realism in general I suppose isn't really important. That's not what's being evaluated on here. Instead what's being evaluated is more have you completely applied your techniques all over the thing to the same standard down to the smallest details. And that's a really important distinction to understand because that leads us to number three. And number three is that some of those artistic things that you might see in other competitions so very direct lighting or OSL or whatever, you know realism when it comes to weathering or patterning or stuff like that. That isn't really as relevant and in fact might actually count against you at best. It's going to be neutral. Instead what matters here is that flawless execution. The smoother everything is, no blends, no brush strokes, unless they're doing something like weathering or something like that. And then that has to be evenly distributed around and everything brought to the same level. In the initial video I talked about Golden Demon being a subtractive competition. What do I mean by that? It's a subtractive competition because you're not going to win based only on the virtue of your art. You're not really looking at the piece and saying this one's more difficult, this was more artistic so we're willing to forgive flaws. This isn't evaluation of something like ice skating in the Olympics where you could fall in an ice skating routine and still win a gold medal. If you're doing four quad jumps and in the fourth one in the back quarter of your program you fall, the judges actually think that's probably expected. Those are nearly impossible jumps to execute once let alone four times and deep into your program you're exhausted. If the rest of your program was highly proficient, technically and artistically beautiful and showed all the rest of your skills, they'll forgive you that flaw. That's not really going to be the case here. The flaws will set you to the side. So having any kind of roughness or unfinished areas or things that aren't by the way unfinished I mean not taken to the same level as everything else can very much count against you. Difficulty isn't a thing. If you paint the smaller thing better it wins. It doesn't matter if someone did something twice as big, three times as big, three times as more complex that's irrelevant. Difficulty isn't taken into the equation. What matters is the execution and I think that's a hard thing for a lot of us sitting on the outside to wrap our heads around. But category by category over and over again you saw cases where the larger, more difficult piece was set to the side because of a flaw because the smaller, easier to execute piece and I don't mean that with any negative to the artists who chose them. They chose that piece because they like it or they wanted to paint it or whatever was then chosen. What this effectively means is Golden Demon can have some landmines. You're going to have pieces that don't do as well as you hoped for reasons you might not understand. Maybe your composition was slightly wrong. It didn't sit well with the judges. You had a figure that kind of looked out of place in some way or wasn't exactly correctly set with the rest of the piece. Didn't seem as finished. Those little somewhat sometimes arbitrary flaws, if perceived as a flaw, you're done. You're set to the side. One of the things that I've heard people say is if you have to explain your intention you've already lost. What Golden Demon really teaches us and if you really want to compete to win is you should be minimizing risk. Painting larger, more exorbitant, more crazy things unless you're going to be incredibly proficient in them is often introducing a risk. So there's been the question of why don't backdrops often win. And there were actually pieces this year with backdrops that won. Well the reason was simple because probably the types of people who were doing backdrops were taking more artist painterly approaches to their pieces, which isn't what Golden Demon was looking for. This year we saw Matt enter a piece with a backdrop that was very much still in exactly the way Golden Demon was looking and as far as its execution, its cleanliness, and its overall quality, and so replaced. Effectively, and this sounds more negative than I mean it, paint as little as you have to often. Don't do over exorbitant bases, over exorbitant backgrounds, larger pieces because those just will give you more chances to fail. If you're not sure you can take all of that to the same equally high level, it's just more area for flaws to be discovered. Working in the smallest amount of space on the smallest figure possible gives you the least chance to screw up. Now there are of course some categories where this is counterintuitive, things like the dioramic category where big can often equal good because you can tell more of a story. As always, when you look at something like Ben Komet's piece in Duel, which was beyond massive and incredible the scene it set, there is always room for something to say Warhammer is awesome so cleanly and so clearly and so loudly that even any potential flaws it has are overlooked because it is just so Warhammer, which is part of the competition. That's not in any way a judgment on Ben's piece, it's just it was extremely Warhammer and certainly there were flaws in how it was painted, no judgment on Ben, but I that's straight out of his mouth more or less, but it it was so Warhammer and so good and so big and so impressive and so awesome in what it displayed in this incredible scene from Warhammer's history that in that case those flaws are overlooked. So difficulty, no, but Warhammer is awesome, yes, that can excuse flaws. That leads me to my next point. IP rules the day. Working within Games Workshop's intellectual property is absolutely critical and I mean this down to the smallest detail. If your painting space marines get those battle honors and details and everything like that in the correct place. It's not a time for you to be experimental with how you think something should look, I think it would be cool if my sisters of battle looked like this and had this iconography here. No, it needs to exist within the narrative, the lore, and the scope of the story that is Games Workshop. There were multiple pieces this year that got basically kicked out of consideration that were painted exceptional, but they were kicked because the lore wasn't accurate. Either they used figures that didn't fit within sort of the time period that was being portrayed or they didn't seem to fit directly into their world or they mixed some of the iconography of AOS and 40k in some unclear way or they didn't use the proper iconography in the proper places for the figures where that is extremely well designed and well sort of labeled and written down, i.e. like for space marines where there is an exact place everything is supposed to be on the miniature. So if you're going to do a piece and it has some established lore of how it should look, follow it. Live within the Games Workshop universe. I cannot emphasize this enough. There is nothing you can do and there is nothing that will overlook this. If you do not work within their lore, your piece no matter how good it is, no matter how cool it is, even small details of IP violation can just get you instantly set to the side. So be aware of that as a hurdle. Work within the universe that they've provided risk. I'm not telling you not to try for an awesome piece. Awesome pieces have their own value because in the end some big awesome pieces, your artists are going to see those people who walk around the cases are going to see those people are going to share pictures online and those will inspire and motivate people and I'll talk more about that at the very end. A lot of that might have seemed harsh or make you sad or you might feel like oh that seems weird or unfair. I don't want to get you down or make you feel like I am in any way judging normatively golden demon. I'm not. I'm simply laying out the facts as I see them. Every competition has bias, has sort of a way it perceives the pieces and the types of pieces it's going to promote and put to the top. There's nothing unique or different about golden demon in that regard. That is every painting competition because they are all run by humans. There's nothing wrong with that. The more you know it and accept it, the more you can help set your expectations accordingly and know whether it's the right competition for you. There's nothing wrong with it. It just is. Be aware, paint accordingly and then you'll be happier. Let's end on some happy stuff here. I want to talk about some of my favorite pieces and that's the thing about golden demon. There's so many artists doing impressive work and I really do hope to see the competition here in the U.S. and beyond continue to grow because I find it so inspiring to walk around those cases and see what everybody else has done. I want to share with you some of my favorite pieces amongst the winners. First up is Eisenbrecht. This was Alexandra, sorry I'm looking down, Alexander Dos Santos. I apologize I didn't have his name locked in my head. I really loved this man. This ended up taking a bronze and single figure. I met Alexander there at the competition. This piece just blew me away. I thought it was really, really wonderful. I absolutely loved it. So just incredible work, wonderful use of kind of the light and the non-metallic and how he executed across the piece and converted this character into something completely new. I just, I really dug the piece. I just thought it was awesome. Number two, Sigvald by Caja. Oh, this thing is so glorious. You know that I'm obviously biased. Sigvald being one of my favorite characters and Caja's execution here is so unique. Such a unique voice and this is an example of what I mean. This is so far from traditional heavy metal style, but look at how perfectly this is executed, cleanly and effectively across the entire piece. So for those people who say you only can paint in a heavy metal style and win, I say pff, Pasha. Not true at all. Caja shows us what it means to take her own style and translate it into something that the Golden Demon judges, value, respect, and commend. Beautiful piece, incredible work by an incredible artist. Number three, this great unclean one is the Forge World version from Sam Lenz. Sam is obviously a friend and in my opinion one of the absolute best artists working in the world and I just love all of Sam's work. I had the joy and pleasure of seeing this great unclean one quite a while back and I couldn't wait for him to enter this thing. I was so happy it won an award. Honestly, in my heart it was the gold in the category, but I'm not the judge who makes the decision. This thing was exceptional. I love the banner, I love the palanquin of all the little Nurglelings carrying him, I love the execution of the wounds and the goop and the grime. This is everything Nurgle should be. It was A plus fantastic home run. One of my favorite pieces of the show. These Chaos Warriors from Mamacon I just thought were awesome, cool, minor, but extremely effective conversions on all of them and a great way to put these new sculpts into a really, really, really great unit that just hung together coherently but also each had their own unique personality and style. A really great execution on what it means to compete in the unit category. I did an interview recently with Mamacon. You can check that out linked up above. Not leaving behind unit these absolutely incredible vampires from Robin McLeod. I think a lot of us spotted these. He put these in the case early and right away we knew these were gold in the category. I can't imagine a better unit. It is so clean, so perfect, wonderful execution. Truly Robin just blew me away with this one. It is to me the perfect execution of this unit and the dream of bringing them to Golden Demon realized. From the first time we saw this unit I said somebody's going to bring them to Golden Demon and kill it and Robin did. Last up this sister's war suit in vehicle. I don't think war suits should be in vehicle but here we are. That is okay. That wasn't Will's choice. This sister's war suit is absolutely magnificent. It is beautiful. Will painted this up to the last moment. He submitted this like a minute before the close off on entries and every minute was worth it. This thing is so crispy and clean. I absolutely love the execution on this. I love the light, the minor variation between the front being warm and the back being cold. Just little touches but still done very much in that absolutely in that style that Golden Demon is going to respect because it is executed so darn well. So great stuff. My final thoughts. Golden Demon was a lot of fun this year. I can't claim that I'm super happy of course. It's never fun to walk away being not winning, being a loser but that's all right. That's the nature of competition. You're always going to lose more than you win. I had such a great time talking to all the other artists, looking at all the pieces and being super inspired. I can't get enough of Golden Demon is my honest answer. I'm thinking about whether or not I want to go back in the fall, head over in October, even though I know there's going to be a bunch of tough competition there as well. But it is really fun. Knowing and understanding the nature of the competition, the fundamental nature of it, I think only helps us all compete in it. There's no reason to set your expectations wrong and then be sad. Win the world of what you can do and can work in and the styles that are acceptable is really quite wide. You just have to work sort of within that right space and you can find great success at Golden Demon. So if you're thinking about it or participating, I do hope you will at some point in the future. It's a lot of fun. I hope to see you there around the cases. I hope to have you show me your piece, talk about it, be excited about it. Let's all be excited about the miniatures we paint and this is just one big excuse to get together, bring together everything we've painted, and be excited about it together. So with that, I'm going to leave Golden Demon 2022 in the US behind and start formulating my plans for the future. Thank you so much for watching this. I really do appreciate it. If you've got any questions, drop those down below. Give this a like, subscribe if you haven't already. If you've got additional help or you want additional help with your miniatures, we have a Patreon focused on helping you take your next step in your hobby journey on review and feedback for you. So check that out. Link is in the description. Thank you so much for watching this one. I really appreciate it. And as always, we'll see you next time.