Ten for Ten

I wrote a whole post about Breaking Plaid a couple weeks back — the uniform, the decade in Black Watch tartan, the wave lines I added to the grid to make it more “me”. What I didn’t know when I wrote that post is that the design would go on to place 10th out of 1,634 entries in the Elevated Classics challenge. Which is a genuinely fun sentence to type, but it’s not actually the sentence I want to write about today.

Here’s the one I want to write about: this marks my 10th top-10 finish.

Not my 10th entry. My 10th top-10, out of 107 challenges entered over three years. Do the math on that and you get an average placement in the top 9.2% of the field, challenge after challenge, against thousands of other artists. I keep track of these things in a spreadsheet. You’re not the only one surprised at that.

Three years ago I was drawing on an iPad, entering my first challenge with absolutely no idea whether any of this would go anywhere. I just liked drawing and wanted to see if I could turn fun into anything more. Turns out a decent number of folks like what I do, and vote for my work repeatedly, which is the kind of validation you can’t manufacture for yourself no matter how many pep talks you give your own artwork at 5 am.

So: ten for ten.

Breaking Plaid gets to be the round number the milestone lands on, which feels fitting for a design built entirely out of a grudge I’d been carrying since fifth grade. If you’d told the kid in the ill-fitting uniform that this is where it would end up, she would not have believed you. (And I still don’t like being told what to wear.)

Thank you, genuinely, to everyone who’s voted on any of these 107 designs — win, lose, or 68th place. This one’s for you as much as it’s for me.

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