I first joined Artfight 2 years ago, when Blufoxdog roped me into it. That year I only did one entry for Artfight, and it was an illustration of one of their OCs. I’m really glad they got me into Artfight, because this year I asked all my students if they wanted to join and many of them did. Most of them got extra motivated to draw even more, and some of them drew each other’s OCs.

In this blog post I’m mostly going to feature my own artwork. I’ll do a separate post later featuring my students who participated in Artfight this year.

In case you don’t know what Artfight is, it’s an annual event that happens every July for the whole month. This year they ended it just yesterday because the site was so slow and it was down more often than anyone would have liked.

Anyway, it’s basically like free art trades. You join one of two teams, and every year Artfight has a different theme. Two years ago it was Coffee vs. Tea, this year it was Sugar vs. Spice. I was on team Sugar, and for most of the month I think Spice was winning. But I didn’t really do it for the win so much as getting my students motivated and to draw some stuff for them for free to make them happy. After you join a team, you can start either by attacking or by putting up reference images of your original characters (OCs) so that you can get “attacked”. You attack by drawing/illustrating an OC from the opposite team. You can draw multiple characters for more points, and also the more complex or detailed your illustration, the more points it’s worth. You can also friendly-fire teammates, but it won’t be worth any points. Whichever team has the most points at the end of Artfight wins, presumably.

Here are the pieces I did of my students’ OCs.

Here is Annabelle’s OC, Warryn:

Here is Mae’s OC, Charlie:

Here is Lily’s OC, Horizon:

And then because Karen friendly-fired me, I had to revenge-friendly-fire her back. So I drew her OC, Rover:

I mostly tried to illustrate these quickly, like in one night for each. Pushing myself to draw quickly for my students over the years has helped me draw way faster. I also just have a lot of fun drawing my students’ OCs for them.

This year most people who attacked me on Artfight seemed to really like the new OC I posted on my profile, Cactus Cat. I kind of came up with them spontaneously (I still don’t know Cactus Cat’s gender actually… maybe I’m leaning towards a girl.) But here’s the reference image I’d posted for Cactus Cat, which seemed to be my most popular new OC I came up with this year lol.

Originally she was meant to be a thing you clicked on for a clicker game that I wanted to make in like a weekend. The idea was to constantly click the cat, as if to pet her, so that she can be happy and you can… have more cactus cats >_>. The game was to be modeled after the Cookie Clicker game. So in the case of Cactus Cat Clicker, you’d be a very altruistic person to be constantly petting this cat to make the cat happy and… uh… make more cactus cats so you can get even more cactus cats? Lol it’s supposed to be modeled off of the Cookie Clicker game which is just you clicking the cookie constantly to make more cookies so you can make more cookies faster.

Uh, anyway.

I really love the turnout of my students in Artfight this year, I’m excited to publish the next post featuring their artwork.