The pick ...is in.
The fans have weighed in, and after reviewing their votes plus feedback from our Flingers team, we reached a pretty clear consensus around a single artist. All arrows seem to be pointing in the same direction.
So, we’ve decided to skip the originally planned Grand Finale Event and simply name that artist the winner...which we’ll reveal on Wednesday, September 23. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, scroll down to see their artwork up-close. One of these artists will win the $1,000 prize and create the next full cast of Flingers Craft Characters.
Born in London. Raised in New York. John has lived in Bloomington since 2003. His love for comics inspired his artistic journey and he’s been a fan of Flingers since it was downtown, when you could get half priced Flinger Rolls on Wednesdays. John is married with four adult kids, a dog, and a cat.
Hayley is a Bloomington-based artist with a background in art history and a love for bold, playful illustration. Her work blends retro, mid-century, pop-art, and tattoo-inspired influences with a quirky sense of humor and strong character design.
Kannon was born and raised in Bloomington and is currently in Denver pursuing further education. He actually created these character designs the year before he left for Colorado, so he was technically still a local when he made them, qualifying him for the contest. He loves character design, and getting the chance to enter an art competition like this was the motivation he needed to explore different styles and themes. He’s grateful for the opportunity and wishes good luck to his fellow artists!
Doris is a wife, mom, and freelance artist.
Richard loves any opportunity that allows him to doodle, draw, sketch, scribble and illustrate, and he also loves any meal that involves dipping a cheesy crust into ranch.
Faith is 12 years old and has always been into art and design. She loves competitions like these because she enjoys showcasing and challenging her art skills. She also strongly, absolutely believes that Flinger Rolls with ricotta are the best thing you could ever put in your mouth.
Project Pie is a contest searching for one local artist to create original characters for each of the 21 menu items in our craft character series.
Around the time Flingers re-opened in 2015 as Bloomington-Normal’s home for craft pizza & craft beer, we noticed many major craft brewers putting fun names and labels on their beers.
Three Floyds is a great example. Rather than simple names like 3 Floyds Pale Ale, 3 Floyds Wheat, and 3 Floyds IPA, they created Zombie Dust, Gumballhead, and Lazersnake…and each with its own custom artwork. In the ice cream world, Ben & Jerry’s does something similar. Each pint features its own wacky name and a cool design, like Cherry Garcia or Half Baked.
So we thought: if Flingers is really a place with craft pizza, why not go all-in and apply that idea to our own suite of original menu items? Only one problem: we’re not artists. We can come up with fun names, but someone else needs to create all these characters. How can we find that person?
That’s Project Pie: our search for one local artist to create original characters that personify each of our craft pizza creations, giving them their own visual identity.
To keep it fair and compare apples to apples, everyone who enters must create the same 4 characters: your renditions of the Super Freak, the Flinger Rolls, the General Cheesebomb, and one wild card of your choice. Then Flingers fans weigh-in with their vote, and we determine the winner who gets a big cash prize and then has all winter to finish the rest of the craft characters before they’re all featured in the new menus after the first of the year.
Flingers is your pizza pub. And we’re turning over one of the most important parts of our identity to you –because our customers are collaborators, not cardboard cutouts. So if you’re an artist, or if you know an artist, let them know this contest is going on and direct them to this page. It’s Project Pie. Let’s see what you got.
