Rules and Guidelines

Please read carefully!

• General contest rules
  
• "Early Bird" rules
  
• Guidelines
  
• Disclaimer

General contest rules

1. Only one entry per artist will be accepted. Once the entry is submitted, changes to the artwork will no longer be accepted. You cannot withdraw your entry and submit a new one.
2. The submitted artworks can be hand drawn (or painted), computer graphics (CG), or a combination of the two.
3. Submissions will only be accepted as .gif or .jpg files. If your work is not CG, please send a scan (or scanned photograph) of your entry.
4. Do not steal the work of other artists and pass it off as your own. Note that the judges are well-acquainted with the lain fanart currently available on the internet.
5. Produce original work. Do not steal poses and other elements of composition from existing artworks (except in the case of an obvious parody or homage). Cutting and pasting from existing artworks (fanart or official art) is strictly prohibited. Tracing or copying art does not count as original work.
6. No adult-oriented artwork will be accepted. Meaning: don't submit hentai or explicitly violent images. A little bit of fanservice is okay, but don't go overboard. PG-13 is a good indication of what we're looking for. Explicitly sexual artwork that has digital mosaic or other forms of censoring will not be accepted.
7. The entries may not be art that has already been published on the internet. After submitting your artwork, we request that you do not republish your art anywhere else until the contest has ended (failure to comply may result in disqualification).
8. The original artists retain full copyrights to their work, but implicitly agree that the submitted works can be displayed on the contest site, even after the contest has concluded.
9. Contest winners must provide a mailing address to which their prizes will be sent. If a winner lives outside of the United States, he or she agrees to pay the cost of shipping his or her prize.
10. A description of the contest prizes can be found here. We reserve the right to add prizes as necessary.
11. Only the top 4 winners will be guaranteed prizes. This is in case only 4 people submit serious entries and the rest of the entries are stick figures. This rule will be repealed if it becomes obvious that there are a decent number of serious entries. [2/27/03 Update: as there are so many great entries, this rule has been repealed.]
12. Contest winners will receive an email indicating that they've won. The winners must reply to this email within 2 weeks in order to claim their prizes.
13. Failure to abide to the contest rules will result in disqualification. Disqualified entrants will have a second chance to submit a more appropriate entry, so long as the contest deadline has not passed.
14. The judges reserve the right to disqualify (upon their own discretion) any entry.
15. Close personal associates of the two judges are ineligible to compete, though they may still submit artwork to be displayed.
16. Have fun, and good luck!

Send your entry (by e-mail only) to leng@cjas.org no later than March 1st, 2003. Please include your name, age, and location.

"Early Bird" rules

To encourage people to submit their artworks early, any entry submitted within the first week of the contest will automatically be entered into the first Early Bird contest. The top entry from that first week will receive the first Early Bird prize (see here).

Any entry submitted within weeks two and three of the contest will automatically be entered into the second Early Bird contest. The top entry from weeks two and three will receive the second Early Bird prize (see here).

Note: All artwork submitted early, including the Early Bird winners, will still be eligible for all the prizes in the main contest.

Guidelines

The title of this contest is "layer:14 SIMULACRA - the many personalities of Lain".

According to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, a simulacrum is:

1 : IMAGE, REPRESENTATION [a reasonable simulacrum of reality -- Martin Mayer]
2 : an insubstantial form or semblance of something : TRACE

Lain manifests herself in a variety of ways in serial experiments lain. She appears in numerous forms, and it is difficult to say which one is more real than the other. Lain exists according to how each of us sees her, and in that sense she is the epitome of the term simulacra.

Entries should reflect that theme. The artwork should be of Iwakura Lain (but may include other characters along with Lain). Portray your favorite version of her personality or come up with something that is completely your own perspective. Lain is inherently multiple. We look forward to seeing how each of you imagines Lain, whether that is the Lain we are familiar with from the anime or Lain as we've never seen her before. We intentionally chose an open-ended theme; we fully encourage you to let your imagination run free.

Disclaimer