You can see a lot of effort went into these illustrations.  A lot of inspiration.

check out the article I wrote for this contest. Featuring most of the inspiring entries produce from this contest: [link]

I am not doing anything with Deviant Art again. Bottom line it was fun creating my piece, but the way the contest was handled was very poor. Step it up next time DA staff and try and respect your community of artists.

I don't get why people are so upset with this contest. 25 very good entries were chosen.
And on top of that, everyone can clearly see that this was a marketing gig for the new Tomb Raider game. So knowing this, it is really up to everyone if they want to enter or not. Nobody forces them to.

Awesome... Love Your Hard Works Guys, ENVY YOU people

So it took the judges about 6 days to select 25 entries from a total of 5000. And it has been 8 days after and they have not selected 3 from a total of 25. Judges, get to judging. And I keep saying that not all 5000 images where judged, they just picked 25 and went "oh, we already have 25"

Worst of all that is happening in this competition, is to see team DA not explain or resolve these problems ... One art to be is subjective, But there was a briefing, there were these rules and totally disregarded ... will the company or even Brian Horton this knowing of these problems?

had over 5000 entries, I think it matters little, their duty was to see ALL ... not see is a sign of disrespect to the participating artists ... and the end result comes out tomorrow and the silence was what the DA gave us ...

I saw on the facebook fan page they posted the game's semi finalists, I still think it could this not go unpunished. not right, not fair ...

Not impressed by the way DeviantArt staff have handled this contest. I think a lot of Premium membership paying artists will feel disappointed by this, and rightly so.

Good luck to the chosen finalists. At least Brian Horton will take the proceedings from here.

I think that the issue here is not so much about the art that was chosen. Art is, and always will be, subjective, so there will always be debate where people disagree about what they like. Congratulations to the 25 finalists, some of which are most definitely deserving in my opinion. Others maybe not so, and I'm not afraid to say it.

I think what really bothers people here is that there was a clear indication of lack of commitment and imagination from the Deviant Art Judges.

To have included an entry in the beginning which was a blatant copy of original artwork clearly revealed that none of the judges were in any way familiar with the official artwork, nor cared it seems.

Why bother going through the process of drawing up a complex document detailing the rules of the contest if you're not going to implement them?
Oh no wait, someone was paid to write that document.

If we're operating along the lines of 'rules are there to be interpreted as you will', disqualifying other entries due to the presence of a logo seems incredibly harsh and somewhat hypocritical.

Also, it is not possible to view and assess 5000 entries in 5 days. It is a huge task yes, but when dedicated people are put to it, it doesn't necessarily have to be a tedious one. (Maybe give yourself more than 5 days? There's an idea...)

I was naive to believe that DeviantArt still operates as it did 6 years ago when I joined; when DeviantArt was a site for amateur artists to display their works and get genuine feedback from a community whose sole interest was to nurture and encourage emerging artists.
Now DeviantArt is another corporate machine, like many other great web communities which have been ruined in such a way.

This contest was clearly set up as a huge publicity opportunity for Crystal, Square Enix and the game. DeviantArt allows them to freely 'advertise' to all artists in a non-intrusive way. In return the get cheap promotional artwork and vastly increased sales due to publicity. It's clever marketing.

As for the rest of the contest, it relieves me that the rest of the judging will be left to a genuine artist; i.e. Brian Horton who is very likely to recognise when work has been copied from official artwork.

Anyway, to those artists who feel disappointed by the selection I wholly sympathise with you.

To the DeviantArt staff: any credibility your site may have had is now lost on me. I won't be buying the new game, I also won't be renewing my premium membership. I'm going to dig out my old Core Design games which were made by a British company, back when games were made for enjoyment, not for commercial profit.

PS: Good luck to ~Sanchiko, my favourite of the selected finalists by far.

and the process of selection waaas....???

I tought the contest rules says we were suppose to find inspiration to got the main idea on the video they give us on the contest poster, these works don´t talk about the growth of the character

bah! Can anyone see the resemblance between some entrances like this: [link] with this: [link] though the second one was no.1 on all times faves long time and didn't made it on the finalists and the similarities (as concept) are pretty huge for me... Where's the originality, or better, which one deserves more to be here, seen that the second one was the first one to post his entry?

Also this: [link] looks almost identical like this: [link] that again didn't made it and was long time on first page all time fav as well....
I'm wondering what criteria the judges used, if they allow identical concepts on the finalists and picking only one from two....

Altough there are some great pieces that deserves to be here, not all deserves it though, even if they have 50k fav.

Ok I really need to say this.All of this artworks are really awesome but there are at least tree of them that don't deserve to be here,not because they are bad (don't get me wrong) but because there were better works among other entries.For example I steel can't believe this guy didn't make it to the Semi-Finalists [link]