I think the barrier to entry differences in traditional vs digital entries should be reflected only in the participation prizes, not the placement ones.

There is obviously a difference in the physical difficulty between making a digital art piece and actually stabbing into a pumpkin for a similar end result. That difference applies equally to every contest entry, though, not just the ones that place. And the placement prize difference feels even less warranted with the easter egg contest, since you're not fighting a pumpkin to make every mark. As far as cost goes, if that's contributing, that should also be reflected in participation prizes, since everyone in each contest is subject to similar barrier to entry costs.

Traditional painting and working with 3d materials is certainly an impressive skill, but I firmly believe that art isn't automatically worth less just because it's digital. They're different skills with very little overlap. It's possible for someone to make a beautiful and intricate pumpkin carving, but not be able to make anything nearly that quality in a digital format, and vice versa. To make digital art of very high quality, you either need expensive equipment or an insane amount of willpower. In either case, it takes a lot of time, experience, and knowledge of the program you're using to make your art really shine. I spent many days on my digital carving and my digital easter egg, and both were automatically incapable of netting the same prizes as the traditional contests.

Even if cost is the reason, it's a massive overcompensation. The last easter egg contest had a 1st place difference of 1k diamonds and 3 trait disruptors between traditional and digital. The carvings had the same diamond difference with 2 disruptors instead. Pumpkins and easter egg supplies just aren't worth that much, and again, should be reflected in participation prizes as a barrier to entry cost.

Oh, my! I had no idea the difference was that big.

I don't have anything to add to Cat's point but I'd like to share my digital art process to illustrate what was said about time and willpower and whatnot.

So far, I have participated in two art contests - the 2021 Summer Colouring Page and the 2021 Fall Pumpkin Carving.

Both took me many, many hours over the course of a week or so (might have been a week and a half. I don't remember). It begins with conceptualising what I want for a final piece: for the colouring page, this means making thumbnails, and for the pumpkin, this means making sketches. The pumpkin's sketch process was a bit shorter because I figured out a design I liked pretty quickly. Most of the time spent was trying to get the proportions of the skull correct, which was just me staring at a ram skull for an hour and erasing and redrawing over and over again. The colouring page, however, took days as I was experimenting with colours and layer effects, and for someone with no sense of colour theory, it was kind of a frustrating experience when I felt I just couldn't get it right.

Then, creating the actual product.

Lineart is normally fine, unless I want to vary my line weight, then it takes some time. I draw on a device that's not specifically made for art, so the pressure sensors aren't as accurate; this leads to a lot of erasing to make lines thinner, or additional drawing to thicken lines. For complex pieces, the bits of time spent at each place where I want to manage the line weight quickly adds up. Some artists have the patience to draw out every single detail. One day I might be there, but as things stand, I am too impatient. (You can see how the scales on the snake in my pumpkin carving start out pretty detailed and... yeah)
> Cat, Effie, and Ley's carvings, for example, have a high level of detail. The flow of the fur is drawn, the individual petals of the spider lily are rendered, for example.

My drawing program has a wonky selection tool. This means I colour manually - I speed up the process by colouring the edges of a shape, and then filling it with the bucket tool, but even then, things with complex contours take me a while, and I have to make sure I'm not colouring outside of a line, or missing a bit inside of the line.

When the large flat colours are down, I add details. The patterns on the kelpari and the rider on the colouring page took me so long because I would draw one line, then decide it looks weird, undo it, redraw it, and repeat the process again and again. At some point I deleted the entire layer with all the patterns because it didn't look right. It might just be me nitpicking that adds a lot of time, but this does mean it requires more effort.

Then, shading and lighting. This is the worst for me, because I have no idea where shadows are supposed to go, and can only guess. For the most part, it works. But other times, I erase and redraw and erase and redraw over and over again until it feels right. (Even if the final result isn't actually that right). Here, detail is once again the villain because the more things you have, the more things you need to shade. Again, I kind of went the lazy route for my carving and did quite general shading, but an artist with more willpower could have shaded each groove of the ram horns, or each scale of the snake. For lighting it's the same. You can see in my colouring page that I kind of just gave up with the sharp light and slapped it on in the general location of where it was supposed to be. A lot of it crosses out of the lineart. Some of the leaves in the background of my carving are lit weirdly, because I didn't go back and redo them. I think I was so tired when putting on the finishing touches for my pumpkin that part of the lighting on the snake scales actually goes in the wrong direction. Oops.

And that's about it. My product is finished. I might add some post effects to spice it up, but the time it takes to do that is miniscule compared to everything else.

I bet it takes even longer for people like Dinnerbone, who paints their pieces. I semi-painted the shading for my pumpkin carving and it was h a r d. Now imagine the effort it would take for someone to do full painting, for a whole piece. The blending and the colour choices and the absolute skill needed would be insane!


--

This is not to say that people who do physical carving or traditional art don't have to put in as much effort, or as much time. I've carved a pumpkin before... it's messy and I ruined it. It's hard! Colouring with pencils and paints is challenging because of many things, but think of how it doesn't have an undo button like digital art!

Each medium has its own difficulties that the artist has to overcome. Even if physical activities are evaluated to be more difficult for some reason, the difference in prizes shouldn't be that much. A 50% difference a big oof.

The traditional-type contests always have had prizes upscaled vs their digital counterparts because of the cost of materials generally required to participate. Such as having to go out and buy a pumpkin, or buy a gingerbread house kit (or the supplies to bake them), or buy eggs, etc, etc. So the prizes are upscaled to account for this.

I can only imagine how much it costs in materials for some players who create massive projects for their submissions (and often win or place). The extra prizes are directly in relation to that.

I would like to point out that as a digital artist i've sunk money into this skill.
Personally I own a $150 drawing tablet - and this is on the lower end of things. I also have a drawing program that had the cost of $50. Digital art *does* require spending money - from the tablets to the drawing program you can be looking at costs into the hundreds.

The prizes should reflect how much work is being put into these pieces, last fest the file was so large *from how many layers* and different effects I was working with my laptop was unable to even open it. These contests can take hours of your week and the prizes should reflect that.

Someone else pointed out how the cost doesn't even affect other contests - as they used in the example there was the cooking contest: a cake and a salad. The prizes for that was the same even though cake ingredients top the cost of creating a salad. As another user pointed out you could even factor in electricity - running a laptop for hours at a time to finish those are pieces isn't cheap.

The prizes shouldn't be based on cost, and even if they are there shouldn't be such a huge discrepancy in them. As a site that is solely based on digital art I would hope that y'all can take another look at this give the art the value that it is worth.

Thank you for responding, though it seems you misread my post. To quote myself:
"Even if cost is the reason, it's a massive overcompensation. The last easter egg contest had a 1st place difference of 1k diamonds and 3 trait disruptors between traditional and digital. The carvings had the same diamond difference with 2 disruptors instead. Pumpkins and easter egg supplies just aren't worth that much, and again, should be reflected in participation prizes as a barrier to entry cost."

Carvings are just carvings -- the only thing to buy is a pumpkin, given you have stuff to carve it with. There is nothing about a 1st place carving making it more expensive to create than a non-winning entry. It should be a participation prize bonus. Same for the cost of the egg itself. You would need materials to decorate an egg, and maybe winners do tend to spend more, I don't know. But again, it's not worth 1k diamonds and 3 disruptors.

The gingerbread house contest also doesn't have a digital counterpart, so that doesn't apply to this at all. I have no issue with the gingerbread house prizes.