We wanted to do something snazzy for selecting the winner of the raffled painting, “Pumpkin Portrait” by Sean Chappell; however, since tickets didn’t sell nearly as well as we thought they would – Where were all those people on Facebook who commented enthusiastically on this painting when it was first posted?! — we’ve kept the snaz to a minimum to stay within budget.

As far as paintings go, “Pumpkin Portrait” is the painting to own by Sean these days. The primary reason being it’s the first. That’s right. The winner of this painting will own the prototype for all the Pumpkin People Sean is currently creating in his body of work.

So how did we select the winning raffle ticket? Being creative people, we snuck up on our unsuspecting salad spinner and converted it into a lotto randomizer. We filled it with tiny styrofoam balls (thanks to Dollarama), each patiently labelled with a number for each ticket sold in the raffle – 1 through 81. And yes, we had to document it all with photographs just because.

Click on a pic for a larger view.

Suprisingly, the salad spinner co-operated quite nicely. Sean spun it, then the spinner was passed on to me. I had been blindfolded. This made me  distinctly impartial while selecting the winner. Of course, it had to be possibly one of the hottest and most humid days we’ve had in Toronto this summer and me with a winter scarf wrapped around my head! Sheesh!

With our balls sufficiently mixed up (feel free to insert a testicle joke here at your discretion) and me blindfolded, I posed and selected the numbered ball which represented the winning raffle ticket number.

Number 20 was the winner! Raffle ticket  number 20 was purchased by Gary Begner. He was the second person to purchase tickets in the raffle. Muchos Congratulations! House of Scratch will be in contact with Gary to make arrangements to ship the painting. Hopefully, once Gary’s prize arrives, he’ll be able to furnish us with a follow up snapshot of him with “Pumpkin Portrait” in its new home.

House of Scratch would like to send out a heartfelt thanks to everyone who participated in the raffle. Thanks to your generosity and spirit of adventure, you’ve brought our objectives that much closer to completion. It’s still an uphill struggle but the slope is a little less steep.

Thanks again to all who purchased tickets in our raffle and a special congratulations to Gary Begner. We hope he likes his new painting!

Cathrene (and Sean)