2023 Summer Best of Term Winners Announced
We are thrilled to announce the winners of our Summer 2023 Best of Term (BOT) competition, showcasing the exceptional talent, commitment, and creativity of our students at Gnomon.
This competition recognizes the outstanding work produced by students across our full-time programs and individual courses, both online and on-campus.
Congrats to our grand prize winner Liz Chua, who won "Best of Term - Character | Stylized" with her stunning project, "The Purple Dress Up Box!" Liz created this piece in Gnomon's Demo Reel 1 course, utilizing software including Maya, ZBrush, Yeti, V-Ray, Marvelous Designer, Houdini, and others. This original concept draws on her childhood memories with her family.
"This piece is a reflection of my childhood with my four siblings—I'm depicted as the elephant kid. Almost everything in the room, from the props to the outfits, accurately represents our childhood," Liz explained.
Each term, Gnomon's Founder and President Alex Alvarez is tasked with the fun but challenging task of judging all the amazing submissions.
"While it was difficult to judge and finalize the winners, it always is," Alvarez said. "Ultimately, Liz Chua’s piece won for a variety of reasons. Clearly, it is beautiful, full of detail and life. Design, modeling, posing, expression, shading, lighting…all so good. But the fact that it is also Liz’s original concept/design, inspired by her childhood and siblings, that really clinched the win for her."
Our students showcased their unique artistic flair and applied class-learned skills across creature animation, stylized environments, fluid effects, and even tool development in their submissions.
"The submissions from Summer Term were awesome with so much diversity of style, subject matter, and technique," Alvarez added. "I really love how we’re seeing an increase in animated submissions, even for categories such as hard-surface modeling and texturing. While a turntable is commonplace, it is so much cooler when the model is in an environment, or the character has some subtle animation on it."
It's an honor to get a front-row seat to our students' vision, growth, and determination. We are blown away at how they continue to raise the bar each term and make the judging process quite tricky.
"There were so many submissions that were awesome, and came very close to winning a category," Alvarez said. "We will be sharing these as well over the coming months."
Be sure to follow Gnomon on social media so you can see more artwork and learn a little bit about the creative process of our student artists! We invite you to explore the full list of winners below and view their amazing artwork on our Best of Term page.