7th annual Warcraft Student Art contest expands to four categories

The Blizzard University Relations department has been running various student contests for years, and the art contests in particular are pretty awesome. This year, Blizzard is running several, and if you’re a college student in the United States or Canada (with a few exceptions), you can enter.

One of those is the Environmental Art contest, wherein you are to design a location that you could imagine existing somewhere on Azeroth. If you need inspiration, Blizzard has last year’s winners and runners-up for you to look at. There’s also an Environmental Character Art contest for character designs this year — a separate contest from the Environmental Art one, and a new addition to the overall list of contests.

Next up, the Environmental FX Art contest asks you to work within the World of Warcraft style, same as the previous two contests, but this time you’ll be tasked with designing something quite different: an actual spell or ability for the game. The ability needs to be one that could be added to a class toolkit — think something like Chain Lightning or Consecrate. The contest asks that you do the build up to the spell, its actual impact, and then whatever aftermath it may leave in its wake.

The final art contest is for Animation, and it’s specifically looking for a new attack or combat animation. You can choose from three options but must pick only one of the them — you can design a two-hit combo attack, a weapon spell attack, or a summon-and-transition animation (they give the specific examples of emerging from the ground or entering a room).

The contests are, unfortunately, not valid in the province of Quebec or the states of North Dakota, Vermont, Connecticut, and Maryland — likely due to on local laws about contests. For full details on exactly how to submit, plus some other fine-detail rules, head over to the official site and see if any of it is something you might be interested in taking a stab at. Or, if you’re like me and college was a very long time ago, just enjoy some really impressive work once the contest winners are announced.