This past week we ran our first ever weekly digital art competition. We had 15 entrants and gave out $300 to the top 3 students:

1st place, Nyles: Art Link ($150)

2nd place, Iain: Art Link ($100)

3rd place, Alexander: Art Link ($50)

To find out what's so special about these projects, click the:

button multiple times from the explore link and see how the project changes.

We are going to offer these prizes every week. And - the prize money is going to go up. Starting next week, we'll offer $360 in weekly prize money: $180 for first place, $120 for 2nd place and $60 for 3rd place.

For the December 15 contest, the current plan is that there will be $7,000 in total prizes across two categories, Grades 4-8 and Grades 9-12. However, please keep reading this blog, and checking Twitter and our website because things might change to offer more money for more artists.

Hatch Coding is doing all of this because 2022 is going to be an amazing year of creating digital art for youth artists. There are going to be lots of fun, pleasant surprises.

Today I personally reviewed 15 projects and the top 5 projects were all different from each other and all visually appealing. We had projects about donuts, clowns, dogs, African masks and Christmas time. We also had 3 other projects that were "round 2" submissions where the project was submitted earlier and improved for this week. I think we are going to get to round 4 submissions in short order and some really amazing art.

We've also had one artist who has submitted all 3 weeks. Every single week, her code has gotten longer, more complex and more robust. It's actually pretty amazing to see these students grow over time. And we're just getting started.

So I encourage all of you artists reading this to put something down in code as a version 1, and then thing of 3 ways of improving it. Pick one of those, implement it. Now go through this cycle 10 times and you will have an amazing piece of art you can feel very proud of. One of the things Hatch Coding is working on is to help you as a youth artist get your work into the real world, have it seen by strangers, and maybe have them purchase it.

More details are coming soon but I know one thing for sure:

We're just getting started!

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