YouCreate competition

• 1st Prize - £100 Amazon e-voucher, a creative arts portfolio and equipment pack, and a bespoke one-to-one workshop in a subject of your choice with one of UCA's Creative Workshop Tutors.
• 2nd Prize - £50 Amazon e-voucher and a creative arts portfolio and equipment pack.
• 3rd Prize - £25 Amazon e-voucher and a creative arts portfolio and equipment pack.
• Public Vote Prize - £25 Amazon e-voucher and a creative arts portfolio and equipment pack.

All prizes are subject to availability.

The YouCreate Competition is open to students who are aged 13 to 18 years, living in Kent and Medway.

Please read our terms and conditions.

Last year's YouCreate Competition, based on the theme of Culture, saw over 100 entries from across Kent and Medway, with students presenting their artwork through film, sculpture, collage, poetry, paintings, textiles and photography. The standard of entries was outstanding and entrants reponded to the theme of Culture in inspiring and thought-provoking ways.

Congratulations to the prize winners:

• 1st Prize winner – 'The Technophobiac' by Morgan Erbe - view first prize entry
• 2nd Prize winner – 'Boys Don't Cry' by Liv Staniszewska - view second prize entry
• 3rd Prize winner - 'Cultural Heaven' by Daniel Burns - view third prize entry
• Public Vote winner - 'Untitled' by Milo Hopkins - view public vote winning entry
• You Vote winner - 'Jamaica' by Oluwaseyi (Seyi) Olajide - view youth vote winning entry

Entries were judged by a panel of creative and Higher Education professionals including:

• Gavin Delf – Uni Connect Programme Manager
• Zo Defferary – Artist and Creative Workshop Tutor, University for the Creative Arts
• Jaeden Hall – Student Ambassador, University for the Creative Arts and prize winner of YouCreate Competition 2018
• Rosie Taylor – 1st prize winner of YouCreate Competition 2020.

Showreel of all entries

Thank you to everyone who applied to last year's competition - we loved seeing how you interpreted the theme of 'Culture'!

Below is a special video showreel of all of last year's competition entries. 

Wondering what it's like to enter a creative competition?

Hear from 2018's YouCreate:Selfie Competition Winner, David Rabin, as he talks about what it's like to enter the competition and the creative experiences and successes he has had since in the video below.

This year, we asked some of our amazing Student Ambassadors who study at UCA to create some example entries to inspire you to create an entry for our YouCreate Freedom Competition. The results were outstanding and we have uploaded them here to offer you some inspiration.

Don't Touch by Adelina Apetrei

Don't touch is s series of portraits presenting body parts that deconstruct the body from the image of a silhouette and make it more approachable as a mundane reality. The work is also related to body needs and gender preconceptions, allowing the freedom of being yourself in front of beauty standards and body stereotypes. To make this project happen, I took the pictures with a DSLR and I inverted the pictures into black and white negatives. After that, I printed the pictures on acetate paper. I took the negatives in the analogue photography lab and I used the facilities to print the negatives using the cyanotype printing process. After printing the pictures, I let them dry and then I stuck them on a mirror.

Vicki Salmi

I’m a visual artist that uses in automatic mark making, colour and text in an intuitive exploration of accessible materials, process and controlled chance. I take what I see and feel and try to make sense of it by squashing it all down, by rearranging it and flattening it into layers and form. For me this is freedom.

Label it! Freedom of Artistic Expression!

Paint, print, scrawl, scrape

Stick, stitch, bend

Mould, misshape

Get lost in the moment

Fragment, Disrupt

Make a rule, break it

Don’t plan, ok, maybe make a plan, change your mind again

Be contrary

Play, have fun, make a mess

Grab chance, embrace imperfection

Be seen AND heard

Subvert, Confuse

Create chaos, contain it. Create tension, control it

Make sense, make nonsense

Rebel, Reclaim

Reshape

It’s not all black & white. It’s in between. It’s ambiguity

Use Colour. LOTS OF COLOUR

Drown out the noise

React

Get distracted, Get frustrated. Get angry

React. REBEL. Just MAKE

Reform, reframe

Layer up. Push down

WHAT happens.

Be free

STOP

Reflect for a moment

REPEAT

∞

To apply for a free art pack in order to make an entry for the competition, please fill out this application form here