The Newtown Arts Festival Artwork Selection Committee invites regional artists to submit artwork for consideration for the 2015 Newtown Arts Festival.

The winning artist will receive $750 and the winning submission will be used to promote the 2015 Newtown Arts Festival.

The artwork will appear in businesses and public spaces around Newtown and surrounding towns. It will be printed on T-shirts, posters and other items that will be available for purchase at the Newtown Arts Festival.

The Artwork Competition Guidelines and application are available at newtownartsfestival.com. Submissions are due to the Festival Artwork Selection Committee c/o Koenig FrameWorks, 97 South Main Street, Newtown CT 06470, between December 1 and December 15 during regular business hours (Monday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm). Late entries will not be accepted.

While the committee does not want to discourage creativity in any way, members want artists to be aware that the Artwork Selection Committee may disqualify absolutely outstanding works of art simply because they do not fit technical requirements. The committee considers how artwork will look on a poster, T-shirt, and other promotional materials and merchandise. Artwork must be beautiful as well as practical for it to work as a poster/T-shirt design.

With that in mind, the committee is offering a few suggestions to make sure submissions will be usable:

*Consider the theme. The artwork must relate to “Newtown Arts & Culture.”

*Do not use crosshatching as shading.

Very, very fine pen lines, spaced closely together in a crosshatching technique, are not cleanly reproducible on cloth. Unlike paper, T-shirt fabric is textured. The fineness of detail achievable is therefore limited in comparison to what can be achieved on the smooth surface of paper.

*Stay away from large geometric borders.

Frames or borders using large geometric shapes, which must be precisely controlled during printing, will often become skewed or distorted on fabric. T-shirt fabric is not dimensionally stable like paper, therefore during the printing and handling process the material will shift and large geometric shapes become distorted.

Don’t use too much white.

The artwork will be printed on colored fabric, not white. Thus, whenever white or pale tints of color are used in original artwork, white ink must be printed on the shirt. All of the subtleties of pale color seen in original artwork will not be reproducible on T-shirts.

*Dimensions should be roughly the same.

Entries definitely do not have to be exact squares, but submissions should be pretty close in height and width dimensions. Panoramic artwork does not fit well on posters or T-shirts.

Visit NewtownArtsCommission.org for additional information, guidelines and the application. 

Contact Donna Mangiafico at 203-788-7474 or newtownartsfestival@gmail.com for additional information.