Greeting Card Scholarships
Students with artistic talent or a creative mind may enjoy the chance to put their minds to work. A greeting card scholarship contest will also be a useful program for those students who have been more broadly looking for art scholarships but have not found one listed in the databases they have been looking for. As the primary merit in a greeting card scholarship revolves around submitting a piece of work which will be put on the front of a greeting card, interested applicants will need to think carefully about what they are placing in the application. It will be important to remember that many students will be applying for this art scholarship, and as such competition may be stiff. Ideas are often not as original as many think they are, and applicants who want to stand out are going to have to come up with something truly unique and interesting in order to win this reward. Going back over a student’s portfolio of original works is a good place to start. If nothing is there that immediately stands out, students should consider preparing other options.
The Create a Greeting Card Scholarship is offered annually by the Gallery Collection, a company which produces greeting cards for various occasions. Gallery Collection has for five years offered a single $10,000 card scholarship to those who have won an award and gives an additional $1,000 to the awardees’ school of choice. In order to eligible for this greeting card scholarship a student must be at least 14 years of age and be enrolled either in high school or at a college. To enter the contest applicants will be expected to submit an original piece of work which can take on a number of forms from a photograph, artwork or computer graphics. All interested applicants should understand that this image is meant to go on the front of a greeting card and all submitted images should be appropriate to this theme. Submission will be accepted from March 17 2011 until January 4, 2012.
For this greeting card scholarship contest, applicants should understand the judging process that occurs while selecting which piece they wish to submit in their applications. A committee of judges as selected by the Gallery Collection will look at submissions for overall visual appeal, quality of image, creativity, incorporation of design elements, general appropriateness in its use as a greeting card, and its fit in Gallery Collections listings. Looking over previous entries of the last five years, something should very quickly become clear – all of the winning submissions involve a holiday, wintery theme. At the bottom of the greeting card scholarship’s previous winner’s page, Gallery Collection identifies a particular bias not listed elsewhere on the site with regards to the program. This bias towards which cards are selected is attributed to Gallery Collections looking for those images which encourage holiday sentiments and those moments in life that bring people together. This is an incredibly important detail to remember as nowhere else on the site does it state that Gallery Collections is looking for holiday related images, and in fact their FAQ section specifically states that all entries of any piece of art can be submitted for consideration.
If an applicant does not wish to follow through with a card which is built around this apparent in-built judging process, they would be well advised to peruse the website for examples of other cards. The FAQ on the greeting card scholarships website indicates that Christmas cards are their biggest sellers, which may suggest a reason why the wintery theme is so prevalent in their winning selections. However it also mentions that birthday and anniversary cards are also very common sellers. A quick look over runner ups to the previous five winners does involve a number of submissions which include themes commonly related to both of these topics. Applicants who select a wintery theme do seem to have the best chances of winning the award, but it is always possible that an excellent anniversary or birthday themed image may get them through to the finish line as well.
