Entering a print competition is an excellent way to gain confidence and earn recognition. The judges who evaluate your image don’t know whether you’re a newcomer or have decades of professional experience. This factor helped retiree Anne Smyth, whose image Ball in Wire won First Place in the Open Category of LexJet’s Shine On! Print Contest.    

Ball in Wire is part of a series of images currently available on Anne Smyth’s pages on the Red Bubble website. Red Bubble enables artists and photographers to connect with one another and sell their work to customers around the world. Buyers can order images from the Red Bubble site in the form of greeting cards, posters, matted prints, laminated prints or framed prints.

Smyth set up the shot on the deck of her home, combining a blown-glass suncatcher ornament with a coiled spring. Anne entered LexJet’s Shine On! Print Contest with the encouragement and support of photographer/artist/printmaker Nancy Bryant who left a job as a social worker in 2003 to start her own business, Giclée of New England. Anne and Nancy agreed that the Ball on Wire image would be ideal for the Shine On! Print Contest. As Nancy explains, “It’s a great image and very unique. It has an internal glow that works nicely with LexJet’s Sunset Photo Metallic paper.”

Nancy has already used Sunset Photo Metallic for some of her own prints and says she would recommend it to other artists if she thought it would help enhance the luminosity and tones of the original piece: “It is the image that dictates what media I recommend to an artist.”

For more information about LexJet Sunset Photo Metallic paper, contact a LexJet account specialist at 800-453-9538.