London 2012 — Royal Mint 50p design competition
Sunday, April 26th, 2009As part of various initiatives in the run-up to the London 2012 Olympics the 2012 Committee has partnered with the Royal Mint to invite ordinary people to design 29 special 50 pence coins, which will be available in public circulation from March 2010. The competition deadline closed on Friday 24th April 2009.
As inspiration and guidance, the Royal Mint competition website also showed some examples of existing 50 pence piece designs like this one which commemorated the 25th anniversary of the formation of the European Union in 1998:
Competition rules also clearly stipulated that participants had to choose one out of 27 Olympic and Para-Olympic sports to depict, including: aquatics, archery, boccia, gymnastics, kayaking, swimming, table tennis and volleyball.
On the main Royal Mint site itself, there are already special London 2012 commemorative silver and gold coins available for collection, retailing at up to GBP1,295:
I wasn’t aware of the competition until the last few days (whilst leafing through one of my mother’s magazines), but I decided to at least make some attempt at doodling an entry. This is what I submitted which is a line drawing down in a black ballpoint, straight onto the template provided in the magazine, with no editing or erasing:
The portrayal is that of a female archer soaring over the London Eye (a modern landmark located near the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben), with her bow and arrow ready to shoot for the sun, the moon and the stars.
It probably won’t be one of the 27 winning entries but, at least, it was interesting for me to sketch after such a long time of not putting pen to paper in this way and mostly just using photos, Powerpoint, Flash and pure code to make all my visual representations.
We’ll find out the results of this London 2012-Royal Mint competition in November 2009.