Phew, that’s a lot of image downloading from the Art Fight website. I haven’t featured student work in a while and I’ve been wanting to. I’d also been featuring just one student at a time, so I felt like it’d be a good idea to showcase a bunch in one post and have it coincide with the end of Art Fight. I’m really proud of my students who participated!

I’m so happy about how many did Art Fight this year: eleven! I mean, a handful of them already knew about Art Fight and were already participating for years. But I was surprised to discover how many students had no idea about it. It certainly ended up giving more motivation to just about every art student who joined.

To recap on what Art Fight is:
Art Fight is an annual art trading event that usually happens every July for the whole month. You join one of two teams (this year was Sugar vs. Spice!), and you try to get the most points for your team. Whichever team has the most points at the end of Art Fight wins. To get points, you draw/illustrate an original character (OC) of an opposite team member. These are called “attacks”. You can get more points by drawing multiple characters in one attack, and also by putting in more detail, like drawing backgrounds or full body shots instead of head shots. It’s sort of common courtesy to attack back when you get attacked, aka “revenge” attack. There are also revenge chains. It’s all done in good fun, of course!

I’m going to present my students in alphabetical order, and try to feature mostly their Art Fight-related pieces. Some of them didn’t make that many, which is okay. Not everyone has such a free schedule and some may have been motivated to create works outside of Art Fight. Some of them are just looking to do art as a hobby, so there’s a wide range of skill levels. I also want to try to represent the best of their works they’ve done more recently, or this year at least. Some students submitted an insane amount of attacks on Art Fight, so I’ll limit the featured pieces per student down to 6.

You’ll also notice a disproportionate amount of us were on Team Sugar, myself included (lol). Teams are assigned and the system tries to keep it even and balanced. You can switch teams up to 3 times, though it looks like that doesn’t usually happen. For most of this year’s Art Fight, Team Sugar was losing 😛 As I’m writing this, this year’s winning team has not been announced.

Alex (age 28, Team Sugar)

Here are Alex’s attacks. He’s done a great job doing a lot of head shots and has improved so much with character portraits! He’s come quite a long way with creating complete and polished pieces. When we first started lessons earlier this year, he mostly created pencil sketches and studies. As shown by his pieces here, he has gotten quite a grasp on clean line work, colors and shading!

Annabelle (age 16, Team Spice)

Here are Annabelle’s Art Fight-related artworks. After I painted her OC, Warryn, she attacked me back by painting Cactus Cat. Cactus Cat was awfully popular this year lol.

Because she wanted to spend more time on other artwork during Art Fight season, here are some of her other recent pieces. She’s been really pushing her limits on her bigger and longer illustrations, incorporating more sophisticated lighting, perspective, figure poses and color palettes.

Blu (age 15, Team Sugar)

Blu is a professional artist who makes fursuits and furry illustrations. Visit their website here! Blu is quite multi-faceted. They are also a 3D modeler, creating 3D prints to make parts for their fursuits. I haven’t done any 3D art since like 2012 and have not been teaching 3D art at all, so Blu was motivated and has worked long and hard on their 3D work all on their own! Their body of artwork has come such a long way since we started lessons together in 2017!

Here’s also a relatively recent piece they did that I’m very happy with, and I believe was also well-received on Twitter:

Please also feel free to support Blu on Ko-Fi!

Evelyn (Age 17, Team Sugar)

Evelyn’s style is incredibly relaxed and absolutely adorable. She effortlessly comes up with the cutest pastel color combinations. Her OC, Brawn Bagel, is the funniest. He goes up to people who are about to bite into a donut and turns the donut into a bagel and when they bite into it, they get disappointed. But if I remember correctly, Brawn Bagel just wants to change the hearts of everyone to make them realize that bagels are just superior to donuts. XD…

She’s also quite popular on TikTok as a cosplayer!

Jacob (Age 24, Team Sugar)

Jacob puts a lot of time and effort into his work. I’m glad he joined Art Fight, because I was able to notice an improvement from one head shot piece to the next. He also got much more familiar with drawing the muzzle on canine portraits, which is a significant milestone for drawing a lot of animals.

Here’s some of the work he did during some of our classes together, copied from references:

Karen (Age 16, Team Sugar)

Karen did so many attacks this season, and her pieces were pretty different from each other. It was hard for me to choose the “top 6,” so they’re probably just among my personal favorites out of her body of Art Fight pieces. Outside of Art Fight, she has a very generous habit of creating fan art of other artists in the Instagram art community. She even friendly-fired me on Art Fight! Please feel free to follow her on Instagram and support her on Ko-Fi!

Lily (Age 13, Team Spice)

If the stats on her Art Fight page are correct, I believe Lily attacked the most out of all my students this year in Art Fight, with a total of 30 attacks. So again, I just had to pick the pieces that are probably among my personal favorites. This is her first year participating in Art Fight. She seems to be motivated to draw pretty much every single day she possibly can! She recently put up her portfolio website where she is taking commissions, and has also been building a Youtube channel where she usually features timelapsed videos of her illustrations and animated memes.

Luiza (Age 13, Team Sugar)

Luiza seems to have a limitless amount of patience when it comes to revisions on her artwork. We work and work on the same pieces for weeks, stretching her range of capabilities by a lot because of her diligence. For most of the time we’ve had lessons together, she’d worked on paper. She has such a willingness to erase to get her drawings just right, I’m surprised she still hasn’t put a hole in her paper yet!

Here are some of her Art Fight pieces:

Here are some of her more polished, ambitious pieces she’s done:

Again, it’s tough for me to choose the “best” pieces of art because there’s just so many of them, so you should check out the rest of her work on her portfolio website!

Mae (Age 13, Team Spice)

Mae didn’t launch any attacks on Art Fight, but she certainly created some pretty awesome references images of her OCs! Time always flies as we’re working together on her OCs during our classes.

She has such a way with color design. I certainly don’t think I knew my way around colors like she does when I was her age! I believe she’s more experienced in traditional media, using inks and tons of Copic markers. Do check out her other pieces of artwork here on her Pinterest.

Megan (Age 17, Team Sugar)

Megan is competitive, so after introducing her to Art Fight, it seemed to really rile her up to complete ambitious illustrations in short periods of time. I found it quite amusing and impressive. Nothing quite motivates Megan like the chance to beat somebody. I’ve already known that Megan is very skilled at her craft, but I was still wowed by the work she created for Art Fight.

I’d also like to show a piece she did for a school assignment. It’s got an interesting design, and she seemed to work on it very thoroughly. Lol, wow.

Mia (Age 14, Team Sugar)

Last but not least, Mia has no end to the amount of different ideas she has for her OCs and original stories. She seems to come up with a new OC every single day, because during our classes, we’re always working on a new character she just made up. She is a creative writer, a theater kid and a musician. I also introduced her to Art Fight this year. Since it’s tough to balance between creating good reference images of your own OCs while having the time to create good attacks, she submitted just a few of her myriad original creations.

Really cool story with one of her OCs in Art Fight. The one with the white cape is named Blank or “________.” Right after Mia submitted ________ on Art Fight, the character got its first attack in just 30 minutes!!! Within the same day, there were a total of 5 attacks with that one character! People are really into Mia’s OCs!

Here are some of her attacks:

And here is one of her other OCs she illustrated outside of Art Fight a few months ago:

I’m truly proud of my students, and I’m amazed by how Art Fight has been motivating so many artists every year. It really brings out the best things about art-making, in my opinion: Fun and hard work.

I want to thank my students for participating in Art Fight, for bringing so much enthusiasm to the community and continuing to have me as their teacher. I’ve learned so much over the years as a teacher, and I look forward to more fun-filled enlightening hours of teaching! You are all a true pleasure to teach! :D!