Woodblock.com 10th Anniversary Celebration

The Gift Prints page | The Quiz page

What is this all about?

Update: After three and a half months of accepting entries, the contest is now closed, and prints are on the way to the winners!

I am woodblock printmaker David Bull, in Tokyo, and am approaching the 10th anniversary of opening my website (in the first week of July, 1997). I think that's a pretty good excuse to make some noise, and to give away some stuff ... notably, some prints!

But how to do that? It's easy enough to have a 'draw' and pass out some prints, but how to make it interesting? Well, make it into some kind of contest I guess. But a contest about woodblock printmaking techniques would not really be very practical, would it! So ... considering that the whole point of this is to celebrate the 10 years of existence (and growth!) of this website, let's use the site itself as the source of the contest ...

I have created a short quiz made up of six questions, one related to each of the major print projects I have created in recent years. All the information needed to answer the questions can be found on the sections of my website under the domain [woodblock.com], and you can either dig in directly and try to find it yourself, or get a little bit of help from Google. In either case, you should be able to come up with the answers without too much trouble!

What kind of prizes will I be giving away? Have I got woodblock prints for you! This contest will run throughout April ~ May ~ June, up until the actual anniversary in early July. During that time there will be four separate draws - 18 people will be winners, receiving a total of 38 prints, ranging in value from $20 up to $800. Here is the schedule:

• end of April - the first five names will be drawn, and each person will receive a print from one of the five series shown on the gift prints page (one print from each series marked with an *).
• end of May - ditto - five more people ... five more prints
• end of June - ditto - five more people ... five more prints

Then, all the names from the entire three month period will go into a single 'hat', and three winners will be drawn, to receive the following 'grand prizes':

• Prize A - the Kaigetsudo Scroll (value: 80,000 yen [about USD$700.])
• Prize B - a 'ten pack' of prints drawn from the same five series (value: about 80,000 yen [about USD$700.])
• Prize C - a two-year subscription to the new 'My Solitudes' book/print series (value: 96,000 yen [about USD$850.])

Here are the gift prints being offered to winners.

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Note: I have been asked how I am managing the actual draw ... how I am selecting the winners. I am using a 'double randomizing' system. The list of entrants' names - in order of entry - is fed into the List Randomizer at Random.org to put them into random order. Their Sequence Generator is then used to generate random numbers selecting the 'top five' names.

Update - May 1: The first draw has been made, and the first five winners have been notified. The set of six questions has also been rotated ... ready for all the 'losers' to try again! :-)

Update - June 1: The second draw has been made, and the next five winners have been notified. The set of six questions has again been rotated ...

Final update: The final draws have been made, and the last winners have been notified. The sets of questions will be left online, for anybody to try out, just for fun ... Part one is here, part two is here, and part three is here.