The 2023 Pumpkinfest Artist Competition for T-Shirt Design has produced a winner, with 20 artists submitting entries, based on strict design criteria.
Damariscotta Pumpkinfest announces, with pride, the winner of the 2023 T-shirt design competition. An accomplished “giant” in the area, a colorblind high school chemistry teacher, University of New England physics professor, and member of the National Guard Reserves, has won the competition, not only receiving a $500 award, but providing a collectible memory for thousands of attendees from across the country. The 2023 winner of the Artist T-Shirt Competition is Eden Pfahler-Jones of Lisbon.
With a Texas A&M education and University of Maine masters degree in physics, a wife and three children, Eden does not claim to be an artist, though she was raised with a strong exposure to art — her mother was an art teacher. Eden considers her “dabbling” in art as recreation, originally drawing characters from the children’s game, “Dungeons and Dragons;” later morphing from pen & ink to digital art. The winning art was produced digitally. The highly structured style of Eden’s art creates a clean, classic look, with depth. “I chose a font and linked the letters closely, for a rustic, plank-styled feel — like oars in the water, with an overall circular design, as a nod to the pumpkin. In creation of the waves, I realized there is a fun double entendre image, in suggestion of marine animals, as well.”
For those pondering how a colorblind person can assess color and coordination of color, Eden masterfully matched precise pumpkin orange from pumpkin images, by RGB measurement; creating color pairings from those values. “The instructions restricting shading [for silkscreening process] worked to my advantage, since color-wise, shading would present a problem for me.”
Look for the 2023 Eden Pfahler-Jones design on T-shirts, available prior to Pumpkinfest, at: damariscottapumpkinfest.com/merchandise.