I had heard of ArtFight before, but never considered joining. Although I’ve been drawing for ages, I’m still pretty insecure about my art. And more importantly: I get insecure at the thought of drawing someone else’s character: what if I forget an important detail? What if I misinterpret a design feature of the character? What if they just don’t like my style? Well. I figured ArtFight would give me the perfect opportunity to get over some of my ‘fears’ and ‘worries’ when it comes to making art for other people. After all – the only way to grow is to keep going forward, so I decided to give it a go and see what happens! So yeah. I decided to join ArtFight in 2025 and in this blog post, I will extensively share with my journey with you.
What I Expected from ArtFight
Having expectations is to be let down, I’m sure. :D But simply put, what I expected from ArtFight is to maybe get a drawing or two of my OCs. At best. I mean, I’m not a popular artist, so it wouldn’t have surprised me if I got nothing. xD
That was not my goal, however. I decided to join ArtFight in 2025 in an effort to try and get out of my comfort zone when it comes to making art for other people. Like I mentioned earlier, I doubt myself a lot, so I think that ArtFight is a great opportunity to try some new stuff, plus I get to choose which characters I do and don’t want to do. I love freedom!
Concerns
I noticed that a lot of characters come with a bunch of do’s and don’ts. Now, understandably you don’t want your characters depicted in situations that would make you feel uncomfortable, but I also saw things listed that made me think “…would anyone even come up with that?”
Now, I’m quite the TL;DR kind of person so decided to mostly stick to concise descriptions. But little things that make me feel a bit ‘iffy’ were things like:
“don’t change the gender!”
To what extent? And I saw this listed for both human and animal characters. I mean, does this just concern big changes or does it also become a problem if the eyelashes are a bit too long or too short? You know, like how animals in cartoons are usually “gendered” with eyelashes. I wanted to avoid these descriptions, but I felt like I wouldn’t accidentally change a character’s gender – especially if it is female – so I did draw a few characters that has this “don’t” in the list. (I wouldn’t change a character’s gender without permission to begin with.)
“don’t change the skin color!”
Ugh. My monitor has a different color scheme than my tablet. I like to pick a -similar- skin tone manually but this kinda stuff makes me feel like just using the heccin’ eyedropper just to avoid committing an e-crime. For my own piece of mind, I skipped most characters where this was explicitly mentioned. Maybe I’m too new to the ArtFight community, but I don’t see why anyone would willingly spend a few hours drawing a character with the intention to offend the creator by changing the skintone. If it was too light – or too dark – would you believe me that I had no ill intention? I don’t feel like the discussion. NEXT.
“don’t make them skinnier!” / “don’t change their body type!”
Uh. I try to draw my interpretation of what I see and I’m not trying to change your character. In recent years, I don’t have a huge amount of experience with anatomy and all my characters kinda ended up looking the same. That’s why I wanted to join ArtFight, to get more practice drawing diverse anatomy types. I do have a personal preference and it may show. I don’t mean to make your skinny character ‘fuller’ on purpose. I’m still practicing, man.
”do not draw my oc with fecal matter!”
???
Uh…. okay…
wat.
Moving on.
With most of these “do’s and don’ts”, all that goes through my mind is: why would I? Why would I draw your disabled character able-bodied? Change the race? The gender? Even if I didn’t do it to offend you, why would I choose a certain character only to change it completely anyway? And what’s with all the mentions of ”don’t draw my characters *insert something illegal*”? It’s… well, illegal… like, by law. Plus, ArtFight has rules too. They are automatically included and accepted by registering for an account. You could’ve saved me the 30 seconds to go through all of that. :(
Anyway. I understand the concept of comfort characters and how much characters can mean to someone, and the fact that most people seem to be half my age or less on ArtFight. I wouldn’t do anything to deliberately offend anyone, but I am allowed to point things out that are new or weird to me.
ArtFight Drama Through TikTok
Apparently there was something going on against new artists on ArtFight this year? In order to prepare myself for the event, I had been watching a lot of videos to learn more and see what I should and shouldn’t expect. Apparently ArtFight blew up on TikTok last year and that caused a lot of issues. I also read that some artists explicitly write things like “Don’t bother drawing me unless you’re a good artist” (LOL it’s free art, get out) and there are many people on ArtFight that get upset when they don’t get a Revenge (receive art back) and some are just there to hunt for art from their favorite artists.
My OCs
I worked hard throughout May and June to finish some art of my OCs and added them to my profile. I created near full-body artworks of Laila, Satoko and SylverFox. I also added my Dessert Bunpup and Meepie to my ArtFight profile!
ArtFight Teams: Fossils vs Crystals
The teams were revealed on the 22nd of June. Upon seeing the team options, the choice was easy for me: Crystals! But I had a feeling that many of the artists that I bookmarked would have also chosen Crystals, and I was right. I didn’t feel like changing my team just so I could get more points by not needing to do friendly fire – after all, my main goal of joining ArtFight was to practice making art. And if I liked a character, I would just draw it.
So, How Did it Go?
I submitted a total of 19 Attacks, with a couple of friendly fires. I mostly created 2D art with Krita, 1 pixel art in MS Paint and a hand full of Blender 3D artworks. I had a lot of fun working on the art and I was especially consumed with the ‘art gifting contest’ throughout the first part of July. There were several drawings I spent hours on, others between 1-2 hours each. I tried to especially choose characters somewhat out of my comfort zone – not the kind of stuff I don’t want to draw, but rather the stuff I want to draw but find challenging.
I think I learned a lot through participating in ArtFight this year. For starters, I realized that I can be more confident in drawing cute and kawaii style animals of various types. And maybe I was lucky, but I had zero negative experiences with any of the users on ArtFight.
Best of all: I learned just how AWESOME it is to receive art of your own characters! I received 10 drawings of my OCs – and I loved every single one of them! Especially the ones of my Gemstone Cat – Meepie. Meepie’s face makes me so happy to look at – and seeing his face in other people’s art made me smile big time every time I received a piece of art of him!
Art I Received on ArtFight in 2025
It was awesome to receive art of my characters! Each and every piece of art I received during ArtFight drew a huge smile on my face. I’m very thankful for the art I got back!
Will I Participate in ArtFight 2026?
I think ArtFight 2025 was a lot of fun and I will definitely consider joining again in 2026! Joining this year was a good way to ‘ease myself into it’. It was surprisingly honestly fun to participate, although the desire to make my team win did start creeping up on me after a while. I know it’s a ‘fight’, but honestly, I just wanted to take it as a chance to draw the characters that I like, in order to gain some drawing experience. So, for that, ArtFight is perfect and indeed I may do the same thing next year!
