1. Be knowledgeable about the entry categories and make sure your works are registered correctly. Ceramic, Sculpture, Photography, Digital Art, Design, and Mixed Media have specifics that may apply to your piece.
Ex. Ceramics takes all clay works that are vessels. Any that are purely sculptural belong in the Sculpture category
Ex. Photography are photographs that have not been significantly altered by photo editing software. If the image has been altered greatly by color, texture, collage for example, it may be Digital Art instead of photography. Ex. Mixed media are works with a collage type construction. If it is a drawing made with ink, colored pencil and a bit of acrylic paint, then decide if it’s more Drawing or Painting and choose one of those categories. If it is a drawing with magazine collage and sewing, its mixed media.
2. Choose pieces that best address all 3 judging criteria—technical quality, originality and personal voice. The latter is very important to judges and works that earn the highest awards demonstrate all three of these categories.
3. Avoid cliché or trite subjects that are trendy unless you treat them in a unique and personal way. The judges view hundreds of entries and see a lot of similar art among teenage groups. How might your’s be different than one of your peers? Than what you see on Instagram or Pinterest?
4. Take great photos of your work. It will be judge by its image so represent it well. If you are allowed to take multiple images of your art be sure to do so! The more you can show the judges the better. With that said, a 2D piece is just one photo of the work in its entirety (no close ups).
5. Humorous and unusual works are refreshing to judges.
6. Consider the special categories—Gedenk Award for Tolerance, Creativity and Citizenship, the Future New, the Neiman Marcus Award for Fashion or Jewelry, the RBC “Flaunt It” Award, the Herblock Award for Political Cartoon to name a few. Those get judged independent of the other categories and tend to have fewer entries(in general). There are also prizes tied so several of these categories.