What does it all mean? Media Highlights, Feature Artists, and more

It occurred to us that we’ve been tossing around a lot of lingo in regards to “feature artists” and with the Valentine’s Day Art Contest in its final stages, we wanted to clarify what all this means for artists with their hearts set on the limelight.

Media Highlight — You’ve already seen loads of Media Highlights on the official Slushe blog over the last two months. (There’s even one in this very post!) Because we have a lot of information to share with users, and we don’t want the accompanying visuals to get stale with another render from Miro (sorry, not sorry Miro), so we’re highlighting individual works from Slushe artists in our updates. If your artwork is featured as a Media Highlight it will appear in the small slider banner on the front page, at the top of a Slushe blog post, and be credited in the body of the blog post. This is the most common type of feature and there’s no limit to how many we’ll run each year.

[Month] Contest Winner — This one is coming up in the next week! Each month we’ll be holding some sort of contest for the Slushe community, and if that contest involves creating and submitting a piece of art, we’ll reward the winner with a Contest Winner feature. Their artwork will appear in the big banner on the front page and in a dedicated post on the Slushe blog. We’ll also create some supplementary content to accompany it (likely an interview with the winner, or some sort of creative companion piece). There will be 12 or fewer of these per year so they're very exclusive!

[Month] Feature Artist — You’ll see the first one of these sometime in late February or early March. We’ll be scouring the galleries to find some of the best and brightest artists on Slushe to feature their art and origin story (Read: we’re gonna interview you) in this very special feature. Similarly to the Contest Winner feature spot, the artist will receive a dedicated post on the Slushe blog and get linked on the big banner on the front page. Feature artists are selected by Slushe admins but can be nominated by any user via our contact page. There will be 12 of these posts per year so they're also very exclusive.

Artist Showcase — We’re still working out the logistics on this feature type, so no ETA on when you’ll see the first of these yet or the update cycle. Our goal with this feature type is to let the images do the talking by selecting and presenting an artist's sexiest works in a gallery style layout. How exclusive this feature type will be is still undecided.

Have any thoughts or feedback on what you’d like to see from these feature types? If you’re a fan, tell us what kind of questions you’d like us to ask artists. If you’re an artist, share your preferences on how we present you work.

Don’t miss the vote!

Valentine's Day is fast approaching, Slusheans! Our community artists have prepared some sexy gifts for you in the form of their Valentine’s Day Art Contest entries. You’re all invited to check those out and vote for your favorite submissions now! Voting is open until end of day, February 13th, 2019, so don’t delay!

To any artists already looking forward to the next contest, stay tuned! We’ll be officially announcing next month’s the contest theme shortly after we wrap up the Valentine’s Day Contest. Of course, if you’re the lucky sort, you may be able to guess what the contest theme will be ahead of time and get started on your submission early…

Promotional Permissions

We also wanted to let you know that we’ll be rolling out a new option in your user profile soon. We’ve talked before about wanting to ensure we have permission from artists before featuring them in a Media Highlight or on social media, so we’re streamlining the whole process to make it faster and easier for everyone. In the near future artists will find a new radio button in their user profiles which you can click to opt in for features on official Slushe channels. We’ll always link back to your user profile when we feature you so basically this is just a permission slip for free publicity. Keep an eye out for the progress on this update in our development update posts.

MEDIA HIGHLIGHT BY ARTIST: X3Z

The media highlight image in this post is part of the image set Elven Desires - Dungeon Origins. Be sure to check out X3Z’s other creations and give their user profile a follow!

That’s all for this week, stay cool Slusheans!