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35.5: Sea Life Contest – Winners, Bitcoin Announced
Zen Credits can now be exchanged for Bitcoin. Details following winners announcements. 1st Place: KylarF The judges must have had a difficult time with this contest, since there were so many wonderful entries. One dynamic that changes when a contest has many entries (like 15) as opposed to less entries (like 6) is that…
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35: Two Set Sea Life
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. Alan Watts The November 2013 contest is to sculpt a single organism of the sea. A fish, a turtle, a dolphin, or even a sponge. Whichever one living creature you choose, it must live the…
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34.5: Shadow Projection 2 – Winners Announced
1st Place: PleasantZen This piece, titled The Tree on Fire is not about the beauty of magnet spheres, nor the shadow created by them. Rather, the fantastic piece is the result at the intersection of the two. The magnets seem to lay the branches, with individual spheres placed like fruit in a tree. And the…
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34: Shadow Projection: Second Generation
A sequel to the unique Shadow Projection contest of October 2012. Geometric patterns require solid magnet skills, but inventing eye catching shadows with them stretches a whole different part of the imagination. Exactly like last October, the focus will not be on the magnet sculpture itself, but instead on the photography of a shadow dropped…
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33.5: 5 Ring Construction – Winners Announced
1st Place: David Eye catching, when reduced to a small icons. This object was “made entirely with 3 pentagon rings put into a triangles, then made into octahedrons using 8 triangles. Each octahedron is then attached to another on the vertex and then layered with a few more in-complete octahedrons to give it more of…
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33: The 5-Ring Subunit
The September 2013 contest is to build any sculpture using only 5-Ring Subunits. One of the most simple subunits, which still allows great variety of form. Pentagonal rings can be stacked in either polarity, or connected at the sides for interesting experiments into topology. All identifiable rings or chains must be part of a 5-ring…
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32.5: Firearm Construction Entries – Winners Announced
1st Place: EraZorX Magnet sphere sculpting is part art, and part science. EraZorX has mastered both, and has the track record of arguably being the best magnet sphere impressionist in the field where existing objects direct the design. It comes to no surprise that this amazingly well proportioned AK-47 model comes with such fine details. Those…
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32: A Firearm, Fictional or Real.
I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it. -Clint Eastwood The August 2013 contest is to recreate a gun, rifle, pistol, or cannon of your choice. It can be modeled after an existing one, it can be a scaled clone of a…
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31.5: A Symbol or Logo – Winners Announced
1st Place: GalaxyTraveler An elegant, soft, yet sharp rendition of the Android robot. Wallpaper worthy at full resolution. GalaxyTraveler notes that it was photographed inside a light box, on semi-translucent acrylic glass. Appropriate and effective post processing. And cheers to Android OS, and open source software. $75 awarded to GalaxyTraveler, usable on ZenMagnets.com or Neoballs.com.…
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31: A Worthwhile Emblem
“Sometimes a symbol holds more power than the thing it represents. Like the symbol for Thing, the one I created that is confusing and abstract and makes people ask, What is that thing? And I always reply, “If you already knew, why did you ask?” ― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale The July Contest…
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30.5: Human Face Recreation- Winners Announced
1st Place: BenjaminGoosen The most recognizable and well proportioned of all the entries. Solid black background provides no distraction. Relatively clear shot at full resolution. Goosen says, “This is a Guy Fawkes Mask made through blob sculpting (except for the mustache) which in turn made it hard to control specific features such as the mouth.”…
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30: Difficult Human Face
♦♦ This one is HARD ♦♦ To experience the aura of a phenomenon means to invest it with the capability of returning the gaze. —Walter Benjamin Your challenge, if you accept it, is to attempt to create a 3D human head face of magnets, as accurately as possible. In order to succeed, you will need a lot…
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29.5: Magnetic Landscape Art – Winners Announced!
Small turnout on a very abstract contest. A total of Five entries were submitted, and all participants won magnets. Many people, including ourselvers, weren’t quite sure how to approach the construction of a landscape scene. Now that a a stylistic path has been paved, we’ll try a similar contest again in May 2014. 1st Place:…
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29: All Natural Landscape
“Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make one feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly being unraveled. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one’s own being. The mind swells out to…
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28.5: Two Set Monopoly – Winners Announced
Great turnout on the May Monopoly Piece contest. There were 14 entries, though over half of them were tophats. This is probably because it was the most simple of the monopoly piece options shown. But we all have to start somewhere. Magnets spheres generally appeal to math nerds and the intellectually gifted, but to nobody does understanding of…
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28: Classic Monopoly
Fun Fact: The board game Monopoly was originally invented to teach people about the evils of capitalism. And then the Parker Brothers took over, and made millions 😀 There’s a range of creative freedom presented in Zen Magnet contests. On the end with less restrictions, there have been contests to build anything with a certain…
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27.5: Zen and the Art of Cycle Creation – Winners Announced
Incredible Turnout. And many amazing entries in the April 2012 Single Set Cycle Contest. Most of which are impressive, and clearly the result of above average intelligence. Although the limit of Zen Magnets allowed was merely a single set of 216, there was plenty of room for creative freedom. Since there were so many entries of…
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27: Single Set Cycle
Some of the Zen Magnet Contests are like a trek up a mountain, that require large amounts of preparation, determination, and magnets. This contest, is a walk in a small park, on warm cloudy day. The March 2012 contest is to construct a minimalistic motorcycle (or bicycle) out a single set of Zen Magnets. Keep your…
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26.5: Thor Magnet Skirmish – Winners Announced
Only 9 total entries submitted in the February 2012 Thor Sculpting Contest. Of all the contests with a goal of replicating an exsisting object, this might have been one of the hardest. We had two entries that were perfectly tied for first place, many heads above others. Though this was also because our voting system required 5…
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26: The Massive Thor
Update [3/1/13] – Contest Extended until 3/5. 60 Damage per ground attack, with 0.5 splash radius against air. And an optional 250mm Strike Cannon that can quickly remove dangerous units. The February 2013 contest is to create one of the best support units in Starcraft II, the Thor. No limit on the number of magnets,…
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