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Getting closer to having all the Warding Contest entries posted. Should only be one or two more posts after this one. Lauren and I really have our work cut out for us, picking winners, though, so please feel free to vote in the comments section or on facebook. I have several top contenders in mind, but there are only 5 top prizes, and a lot more than five people who deserve them.

First up in this batch are two more photos from Carol in the UK, who continues to ward herself in the most badass way possible. If she ever meets a coreling, she is going to kick its ass all over town:

To Peter and Lauren,

I sent in an entry on the 9th of June and you posted it on your website – thank you.

I have had one of the misc. wards tattooed on my left shoulder since then and have attached the photo’s.

They have all healed now and look wonderful.

Thank you also for the lovely signed bookplate that came in the post.

Enjoy your holiday,
Carol, UK

Dear Peter,

I thought a lot about the contest. Since I have no weapons at home, I couldn’t ward them. So I chose to try out some wards to see in the dark to at least be warned if there are corelings in my way. It actually worked pretty good and I watched them every night to learn how they act.

After some days, as I was just marking very important passages in very important papers for university I had another idea. I took my favorite green pen and warded it. So if a coreling ever gets into my home I can throw some pens at it in order to shock it and then stab it with another one. I combined some cutting wards with fire and lightning wards (as I observed they share this place with only very few other corelings here) and on the tip there are some piercing wards.

I’m thinking of pens against other sorts of corelings but I didn’t want to send you the pictures too late.

Hope you like it

Maria, Germany

P.S. I really want to thank you for the bookplate, I actually got it just today!! I’m very happy about it 😀

Dear Peter,

Ive been following your peephole for a while now so i finally decided to enter one of your competitions, i was sitting in class one day when my photography teacher told us we had to pick our own project and i thought of this competition so I grabbed a camera and took a photo of a friend and than photoshopped some wards onto it. hope you like it.

from Anthony, Australia

ps. thanks for the bookplate 😉

Posted on July 3, 2010 at 1:54 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Craft, Fan Art, Fans, Warded Art
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Okay, so. As of midnight last night, I am no longer accepting entries for the Warding Contest. Well, at least not for the judging. If you missed the deadline but are still working on something, I’ll be happy to feature it on the blog.

While I was off on vacation I received 57 new photo entries from more than 15 Warders worldwide, including many of the strongest entries to date. Several times over the course of the last week, I would download an entry and say to myself, “Holy shit. This HAS to be a winner. Nothing will beat this,” only to have another entry show up in my inbox a couple of hours later that did indeed beat it.

There is nothing more amazing than witnessing the creativity of others, and apparently my readers have a vast reservoir of creativity. This contest has gone in directions I never would have expected, and people have really done some incredible things, spending hours upon hours creating beautiful works of art. I quickly realized I needed to add more prizes. Five signed poster prints weren’t going to cut it. So I will be throwing in some signed books for runners up, and all entrants will get signed bookplates thanking them for their work. Lauren Cannon and I will be getting together this coming week to debate the winners, and prizes should mail out in short order after I announce the winners.

In the meantime, I need to post the remaining entries. In the order they were received, here are the first five submissions that came this last week. I will post the rest as soon as I finish re-sizing all the images. If you want to just scroll through everything, you can check out the photo gallery I posted to facebook.

Hi Peat!

This is my only entry to the Warding contest; it was something that kept me occupied when I should have been revising for my exams, lol. My entry is Leesha’s herb gathering basket, I used some small jam jars, (wanted to use different shaped ones, but nobody wanted to eat the gooseberry jam). I warded along the top rim of the jar and along the bottom, the basket contains a little hog root, stink weed, sky flower, demon fire, and tamp weed.

Nanaki

UK

Dear Peat,

I hope you’re having a wonderful time relaxing with the family on holiday.

This is my entry to the warding contest. I recently attended Alt.Fiction for the first time and had an amazing time. However, I went out for supper towards the end of the day and horror-of-horrors, I realised that the sun was beginning to set and no one had warded the building which we were in. I dashed off to the hardware store and grabbed paint, brushes and a ladder. Thankfully I was all done in time to keep everybody safe for the evening. Picture included is of the finished result.

All the best,
Vick

UK

This is from the PS3 game ModNation Racers. Surely when Arlen’s not killing demons he’s out racing go-karts. I did my best to recreate the wards in the grimoire but I had limited resources in game. You may be able to recognize the mind ward on the forehead, rock and flame wards on the chest, water and wood wards on the stomach, and he’s got bludgeon wards on his hands and knees. I took to the liberty of creating some of my own and used the cover art for The Warded Man and The Great Bizarre for inspiration. Hope you enjoy.

Patrick, Brooklyn

We decided to add our entry into the contest by warding me. The wards were painted by hand with a facepaint. So me and my friend used perhaps one and a half hours painting the wards. It proved to be challenging to sit completely still without laughing. Once that was done we headed out in the middle of the night, literally, to take some pictures. We took some props with us to help set the mood. I was ready to stab the damned abominations!

It took some effort but we sure had a lot of fun doing this!

So, here is a pair of pictures we picked.

Friendly regards.

Jonna & Nina

Finland

Hello Peat,

I was on my way to Cutter’s Hollow to deliver a message, when I found this warded bottle just laying in the grass!  I had heard a rumor that the Cutters were fighting against the Corelings, and were using some substance called “liquid demonfire” to fight them off; I wonder if they dropped this bottle whilst fighting?

I would just like to say that I am LOVING the world you’ve created in the Painted Man series, and I cannot wait to get my eyes on The Daylight War.

Thanks Peat
James, UK

Posted on July 2, 2010 at 4:21 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Craft, Fan Art, Fans, Warded Art
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Heading off tomorrow for my first real vacation in almost three years.

Why so long? Well, right after my trip to Greece in 2007, I began writing full time, taking something of an income cut to pursue my dreams. Soon after that my wife got pregnant and lost her job in the same month. Between the pregnancy and the baby and trying to keep afloat, getting away hasn’t really been an option.

But things are a little better this year and Cassie is finally old enough to travel without too much hassle, so we are taking a week in the Caribbean with another couple and their daughter (who is Cassie’s age)  to unwind. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to it. It feels like I’ve been doing 6 things at once for years on end, and after all that multitasking, I am looking forward to re-learning how to unitask. If I do two things at once on this vacation, I want one of them to be sipping a frozen margarita.

I have some great books to read on the beach, including Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton and Tome of the Undergates by Sam Sykes, both of which are not yet released here in the States, but I have all my cool author connections now and pulled some strings. I’ll have my iPad and can write if I want to, but I doubt I’ll do much more than a blog post or two if people continue to submit entries to the Warding Contest.

Speaking of which, here are the last of the pending entries, the first from Dave in the UK:

Dear Peat,

I follow your peephole in hopes of scrabbling information on the daylight war and the painted man movie (is that still happening??) I usually ignore these kind of art contests because honestly I’ve never liked art and it has never liked me. However I was playing a game (Aion) and was sucking at it and I thought to myself: ‘if only I had more DPS (damage per second)’, but all my buffs etc were already up and my gear was already as good as it was gonna get and so I thought: ‘If I can’t improve my gear, or my spells, I could improve my avatar’.

This lead to a quick new character customisation of what I imagine Arlen to look like, going off to an area where other players would not scoff at my posing and self named ‘Deliverer’ and then posing while taking screenies. I settled on a screenie of my toon pointing at the screen; used paint shop pro to erase the index finger and reform it into a fist, while also recolouring the robes to the brown priest robes I imagine Arlen in; and finally got some wards I had left over from my painted man video and inserted them.

Chances are I won’t log onto the Deliverer again but hopefully they are character transferable, funnily enough the names Arlen and Arlenbales were already taken, go figure.

From Dave

The next entry came to me in the form of a link from Google Alerts, pointing me to the blog GRRuMblers, which is apparently dedicated to being mad at George RR Martin for taking a long time writing his next book. My thoughts on that topic are well documented, so there’s no need to get into them further here.

Blog writer KrKreuk did a post about the warding contest in which she put in some pretty funny entries:

Pictured here is a brave man carefully applying Water and Swamp wards to our ocean’s buoys.  These buoys are meant to stop the oil slick from reaching our shores.  All that is required is the warding of the existing system of buoys along our coasts, and the oil (as well as the oil demons) will be stopped in their tracks. In fact, I don’t know why BP hasn’t begun implementing these, as the threat of oil demons is real along our coasts:

When someone asks you what time it is, you usually have a pretty standard response: look at your watch and tell them what it says. You can even tell them 5 minutes ahead (or behind) if you’re feeling obnoxious.

However, with one of these special Warded Watches, you have another option to the question “What time is it?”

“TIME TO KICK SOME DEMON ASS!” It doesn’t even matter what time of day it is.

Now water resistant up to 100 feet, as well as water-demon resistant (because of the Water Ward):

This exciting new item found at your local convenience store helps protect you from the ultimate demon known to man; children (and real demons).

Take of this what you will, but the wards were specifically chosen for this item. They include wood, swamp, and palm wards along the base, with a mind ward towards the tip.  At the head there is a lone Bludgeon ward; a man’s last line of defense in dire times when he finds himself abruptly kicked out into the night for whatever reason.

These wards are specially designed to resist the most resilient diseases, as well as prevent unwanted conception.  Consumers will be pleased to find that this item comes in a variety of sizes, so get yours today:

One week left to enter, so keep the wardings coming!

Posted on June 23, 2010 at 4:47 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Craft, Fan Art, Fans, Life, Warded Art, World Traveler
10 Comments »

Quick Warding Contest entry from Bill in Florida. He is apparently getting ready to go out into the Gulf and harpoon the oil demons threatening his beautiful coastline.

Hey ya Peter,

Its Bill again. This is my personal spear. Etching and woodburning are still needed, and the damn thing is more of a harpoon, but I love the feel of it! Hope u enjoy!

Bill

Posted on June 21, 2010 at 6:39 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Craft, Fan Art, Fans, Warded Art
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I have a few more Warding Contest entries to post before I leave for vacation on Thursday, but I will have my iPad with me, so I should theoretically be able to post more from the beach, while drunk on frou-frou frozen girly drinks with little umbrellas. Contest ends on July 1 (the day I get back), and Lauren and I will be meeting soon after to pick a winner and co-sign the prizes.

These two entries, the first from Lisa in Germany and the second from Gaz in the UK seemed to go hand in hand—at least in my mind, which I realize probably works differently than most people’s. Both are gorgeous work, both from a warding and a photo composition standpoint.

I will be so sad when this contest is over.

Hi Peter, Hi Lauren,

This is my second entry (the first one is the hooded picture of me with red wards in my face). It took a little bit longer than the first one, because I genetically engineered my pets to display ward patterns on their wings.

Well, at least that’s what I wanted to do, but then I had second thoughts. After all I’ve no idea what the core magic might do to those innocent beetles. For all that I know they could grow to the size of a horse and start feeding on humans. So I decided to paint the wards with watercolor instead.

I can still try the evil scientist stuff when I know more about the effects.

Lisa

Germany

Hey Peat,

This idea came from The Desert Spear when Arlen takes his compadres Rojer, Gared and Leesha into one of his hidden ruins along the road and gives them a choice of many treasures. I believe that this warded guitar was overlooked by Rojer and he missed out on a powerful instrument. The guitar is extremely good at firing power chords straight up the arse of corelings or could be given to an apprentice musician to save having a limb torn off.

Using a sharpie, my trusted old guitar, back garden and my brother’s camera knowledge helped to achieve this. I must admit drawing wards is bloody hard (probably best left to Lauren and Arlen).

Love the books Peat, keep it up mate. 🙂

Gazza

UK

Posted on June 20, 2010 at 3:45 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Craft, Fan Art, Fans, Warded Art
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