The Animal Kingdom Art Contest - Results

The herd together strong. We're delighted to present you the winners of the contest and their artworks. Congratulations to everyone who participated!

BlackPool
BlackPool / Malazdot

This past week, the jungle has been alive with the sounds of scribbling pencils, frenzied brushstrokes and whirring laptops, all working towards the same objective. Creating an original piece of timeless art featuring BlackPool primates and Stake DAO pachyderms living and working together in harmony.

Apes and Elephants from all different walks of life have been tirelessly working to create the finest pieces they can in order to be crowned King or Queen of the jungle and, as usual, the output has been incredible.

Once again, we are humbled by the sheer level of talent we have seen across the board on these entries and would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who took part. We honestly thought having ten prize winners would make the judging portion of this competition fairly easy, but you all proved us very wrong. It has been incredibly difficult to pick winners amongst all of the wonderful pieces that you guys created. Nonetheless, we did manage to reach a final verdict, and the results are as follows:

#10 @FrancoisNikkoo

We begin our top 10 with very fine work from @FrancoisNikkoo. The jury really liked the cartoonish yet fierce depiction of the synergy between BlackPool and Stake DAO. Good job!

#9 @AndreiCGabriel

In ninth place, we have this wonderfully dark piece from @AndreiCGabriel, whose use of texture and traditional-looking digital paint techniques really impressed the jury. Great job!

#8 @saeedanwar007

Eighth place goes to the incredibly talented @saeedanwar007, who has managed to recreate our logos impeccably whilst also emulating the style of our ‘torn paper effect’ competition banner to great effect, all with the most basic instruments. Congratulations sir!

#7 @Angelo10253

The level of detail that has gone into our seventh place prize-winning piece is fantastic. The more the jury looked at this piece, the more elements we discovered and the more we fell in love.

#6 @SophiaSpirlock

Our sixth-place prize goes to this beautiful piece entitled ‘PAX DEORUM’ or ‘Peace of the gods’ put forward by @SophiaSpirlock acting on behalf of the highly skilled Ariarina. A wonderfully abstract piece with stunning use of colour and textures, very impressive work.

#5 @MochiNFT

Whilst @MochiNFT ‘s first piece did hit the mark with regards to our brief, it was their second image which really sealed the deal on their prize allocation. This gorgeous digital creation really impressed us with the level of detail involved and the way they managed to effectively capture the lighting, wave effects and overall mood of these two happy animals playing in the sea. Great work!

#4 @BaradeSimon

@BaradeSimon takes fourth place with this incredible oil painting. Honestly, we have been blown away by the level of talent and commitment put into this piece and have really enjoyed the process shots showing how it all came together. Brilliant sir!

Moving on to our top three pieces now, all of them could easily have won this competition. What a difficult decision it was to rank them!

#3 @JMarkk24

@JMarkk24 earns a very well-deserved third place with this incredibly inventive and well-executed inverse pencil sketch. The level of skill involved in the original drawing alone was enough to send the jury crazy, but when the final inverted image was revealed, we were awestruck. An incredible piece and earned third place!

#2 @desireecallora

This dynamic action shot, expertly recreated on canvas, really took our breath away. @desireecallora achieved this incredible feat in just three days and really managed to create a stunning piece which took the brief and evolved it into this magnificent image which would not look out of place on a 70s movie poster or the cover of a graphic novel. Again, massive congratulations, we are honoured to have been your muse!

#1 @jmythss

Despite all the incredible entries for this competition, there was one piece which completely blew us away and made a clear grab for the top spot. This epic battle scene created by the amazing @jmythss is a masterpiece. The armies standing on each side, the eerie colours, the clever use of space and perspective, everything in this work breathes sheer talent. Our most humbled congratulations to you sir!


Once again, congratulations to all of you who contributed! You have been absolutely outstanding,, as usual! Your talent and dedication really hit us again and we’re extremely proud to count each and every one of you in our community! You may not realise this, but your contributions to BlackPool and Stake DAO go beyond awesome artwork and you inspire us to go further, do better and keep building, writing, playing, with and for you all. The herd together strong!

The next step for us now will be to get in touch with the winners to proceed with the distribution of rewards. As you know, the rewards are passive Aave USD LP tokens on Polygon from Stake DAO. We appreciate that not all of you might be familiar with how LP (Liquidity Pair) tokens or DeFi (Decentralised Finance) work, which is why we urge you to take a look at the Stake DAO Academy. It provides a very extensive overview of everything blockchain, crypto and DeFi while remaining very approachable and easy to understand for newcomers. Of course, you are welcome to ask us any questions, we'll be more than happy to help!