This past weekend, the crew headed out to New Jersey for the newest premiere painting competitions in the Northeast: The Jersey Devil. Read on to find out more about the event…

This was the first year for the Jersey Devil Painting Competition put on by the crew at Mythicos Studios. A lot of the crew drove in from New York, Delaware and from around NJ to come and participate in the event which had such an amazing turnout for its first showing!

With so much to talk about and share, we decided to break this up into two posts. First up, let’s talk about the event itself….

Registration and Categories

The great thing about the event is that you could pre-register online via the Mythicos website. A one time fee of $35 got you into the event and you could enter as many categories as you liked, but only one entry for each.

There were multiple categories for painters to enter: Single (40K/30K/AoS), Squad 40k, Squad AoS, Other Squad, Vehicles, Walkers and Other (busts, dioramas, etc) as well as full on Armies on Parade style displays for both 40k and AoS.

Event Day

People started rolling in around 10am to setup. Being able to pre-register online helped things go a bit more smoothly. There were donuts and coffee on the one side of the space for breakfast. There was a big Bolt Action tournament going on, so the venue could get a bit noisy but we had plenty of space all to ourselves in the back. While there was plenty of space for the big army displays there was some confusion early on where to display the individual category entries but that was figured out pretty quickly. There were a ton of entries too, with at least 15 full army displays and tons for each standalone category, all beautifully painted.

The best part: at lunch time, Mythicos treated everyone participating in the painting competition to a lunch at near by restaurant. CRAZY! Super fantastic of them and we can’t thank the Mythicos Team enough! It was really nice to sit down with fellow painters, talk shop, meet painters we’ve met online and enjoy a meal together. When we got back, the judge had finished looking at every entry and finished scoring. It gave time for Jason to walk around and take photos for Mythicos and for all the participants to look around and check out all the amazing minis.

Around 3:00, they gathered everyone around to announce the winners. Everyone received a free t-shirt for the event and a goodie bag which had some stickers and Mythicos themed dice. Finalists received a really awesome card and the top three entries in each category received a trophy – although they are temporary while the studio gets the final ones finished. If you placed in the top 3, you also earned store credit which you could spend before you left (or online later). The studio wants to get everyone back in January for a lunch to see everyone again, talk about the event and hand out the finished cards and trophies.

Final Thoughts

For the New Yorkers, we couldn’t be more excited to have an event finished that early.  It was also interesting for a lot of us who’ve only entered Armies on Parade in our New York shop. The size of Mythicos was 10x that of our local GW store. Heck, just being able to use bathrooms on-site is a huge plus (yeah, our GW store makes you visit a nearby restaurant if you need to go…). Also while at the shop itself, they had tons of miniatures for sale and a wide range of GW/Vallejo/Scale75 paints and more.

For a first time event, you couldn’t have asked for a better time or better hosts. Sure, there are some things we’d love to see addressed for future events but The Jersey Devil has a bright future ahead of it and we couldn’t recommend it more for painters looking to enter next year!

Check back tomorrow when we share some of our entries…