Artfight 2025 Summary!

Ah, yes. It has been two years since I started this website and I am only making my first blog post now. Great!

Anyway, in more important news July is over and that also means our flight is over if you don’t know what our flight is, it is an annual art gifting game that puts users on two separate teams, where they “attack” each other by drawing each other’s original characters or OCs. I have been participating in Artfight since 2021 and it has been at the time of my life every July I always say I’m busy for most other things because Artfight is basically my full-time job during the month I love making art for other people I love getting art of my characters and I also like the challenge of needing to make a bunch of drawings without sacrificing quality.

This blog is going to serve as a recap for all of my goals and stuff that I did last month. Enjoy!

(I expect you are already familiar with what Artfight is, but if you don’t, quick recap: attacks = drawings you make for other people that give you points based on how much effort you put in, defenses are drawings *you* receive, revenges / or revenge chains are a series of drawings you make back-and-forth between another artist, and your ratio is the percentage of how many attacks you make versus how many defenses you receive (the higher the ratio, the more art you make).)

Goals

Going into Artfight 2025 I had three goals in mind:

• Make 60 rendered attacks
• Get 4000+ points
• Achieve a perfect 50% ratio at least once in the fight.

To explain my goals further…first off, why 60 attacks? Before the fight started, I actually had no idea how many attacks I wanted to do. I was thinking 63 since I did the same amount last year. But then I realized that if I did 60 attacks, that would put me at 299 attacks overall. It was perfect considering that for 2026, Artfight would be celebrating the 10th anniversary of its website. What better way to start off with my 300th attack being sent to the first ever person that I had first drawn for on the site (I checked this year and the user is still active!!)?

Now came the kind of hard part. I wanted to get 4000 points because that is a pretty big challenge. If I wanted to make 60 attacks and get at least 4000 points, I would have to make an average of around 66 points per drawing. For Artfight standards, 66 points is about equal to a full body drawing of a character with some sort of props in the background, which can be pretty time-consuming to draw. However, I’ve made more attacks in previous years, so I wasn’t really worried. The only problem was that I was leaving for a trip in the middle of July, which would of course take away precious drawing time.

My 50% ratio goal seemed easy as it was frustrating. In my past 4 years of Artfight, the closest I’ve gotten was around a 52% since I’m not a super popular artist that gets attacked out of the blue a lot (at least, relative to some other users on this site!)

Regardless, I was ready to make all of my goals happen one way or another!

Season Recap + Favorites

As usual for me, the season started out with a rush of energy. I completed 5 attacks in around the first 12 or so hours, and I was ready for more. I completed 13 overall attacks by the third day, though progress eventually slowed to around 2 or so new drawings per day by the time the week was over.

My trip came around, and while I was away, I achieved my 50% ratio goal thanks to the user Judy9. They gave me a very adorable chibi bean of my Attack on Titan fancharacter Robyn! Funny enough, this is also the same user who gave me my 100th defense in 2023. I am extremely grateful for them and their apparent commitment for helping me get milestones in my Artfight career. :D

My ratio also went down even lower to an astonishing 48% while I was still on my trip. This is the first time in my Artfight history that I’ve ever had a low ratio, and it was frankly a little exciting.

When I came home from traveling, I took a short hiatus due to geting sick. I successfully reached my 60 attack and 4000 point goal, too, but I procrastinated on drawing a bit and got done a little later into the season than I would have liked.

I’m really proud of all the attacks I did. In fact, I’m proud of this season and consider it my best one. Well, I always consider each AF season I participate in my best for different reasons, but this one is special since I allowed myself to be more fluid with my style than the last four years. It felt like I was really trying new things and focusing on how to capture the essence of a character rather than making everything look uniform.

2025 is the first Artfight season where I’ve actually picked up new techniques and have integrated them into off-season art. For example, I played around a lot with textures and blending modes and found out I really like subtle watercolor and paper overlays that add a handmade, warm feel to my art. I’ve also apparently gone back on my 5 year hatred for duplicating the lineart and adding a gaussian blur…who would have known?

Some of my most notable attacks include:

This piece for user Brenilla with nice, a subtle campfire glow and a hard crayon brush used for lineart + lighting. I love how I captured a soft vibe with this one.

This piece for user Whisperwind (who is also my Tumblr mutual) featuring not only their OC but of course, Sasori no Akasuna. I had to plan this one ahead of season since I knew it was going to be a more challenging piece. It waa very satisfying to make and integrate so much of the relationship dynamic into the art.

This piece for user kil1deer which uses all my favorite colors in terms of drawing and some nice foreshortening. Some of the most fun I’ve had all season!

This piece for user Nightmun which I deeply enjoyed making since it has lots of ties to the OC’s story. The pose and slight perspective was also a little challenging, as well as the electricity. I like how I used lots of bright colors but was still able to keep a darker tone to the piece.

This piece for user scorpion (also another Tumblr mutual). I don’t really have to explain, you can tell I just had fun doing this one.

Statistics

Now for the fun part - statistics!

First, we have the number of defenses per OC uploaded to Artfight. I was especially interested in this statistic since this is the first year where I nudged people throughout the entire fight on who to attack. I sort of did it last year when I encouraged people to attack characters other than Valeria, but it was only temporary. This year, I said in my notes that Yua and Cristal were new and that I would love to see them get some love. I also said that Iago was my favorite.

To no surprise, Hazel is this year’s most attacked character. Followed by Valeria, then…Santiago?! I thought Yua was going to take the prize for 3rd place, but I am pleasantly surprised.

Next is ratio of headshots / half / fullbodies that I drew vs what other people gave me.

I gave 21 halfbodies and 39 fullbodies and received 5 headshots, 27 halfbodies, and 23 fullbodies in return. Yup, I don’t do headshots. I just don’t find them fun in Artfight season.

I don’t think this is the most meaningful statistic to make a chart of since I’m not factoring in who’s revenging who and with which attack size, but it’s still fun to look at. I was going to do an average points given vs received, but I realized I would have to go through my defenses again and catalog everything. No thank you. I’m too lazy for that.

Now for some mini statistics: ranking my Artfight seasons based on how well I did in certain categories.

Truthfully, I was hoping 2025 would be a "statistically" better year than 2024, but whatever. I still had the time of my life this July and already can't wait for 2026.

What next?

I'm gonna make some changes to my Artfight profile and revisit my approach to advertising to maximize fun next year. Some of these changes include:

1. Removing most of my non Imago Daze OCs from my profile...sadly. As much as I love Mercury, Judas, Robyn, and Peter, I'm finding that I'm just not interested in their stories as much as the others. The art I received of them this year was extremely thoughtful, and I have ever so grateful for all the attacks!! But going forward I would like to keep everything more OC instead of fan character centered. That being said, my main JJBA OC Brandy will of course stay up since she's a classic.

2. Focus less on filling out hitlists. I keep track of how many I fill out per year. I did around 40, including mass attacks, and only 1/10 of the people actually attacked me. I don't mind this, but I know there's a more efficient way of getting attacks that feels more efficient. Next year, I'm going to try more consistently posting in the target hunting channel on the AF Discord and put my attacks in the art channel.

3. Make a better hitlist. I want to focus more on attacking higher ratio artists and beginners. I've already been doing that for the past several years, but I want to make that emphasis stronger.

4. Focus more on character interactions / scenes? I feel like I didn't draw as many character interactions and scenes as I wanted to this year. Idk

To make a full reflection, I also want to point out things I did this year that were really good and would like to keep going into seasons going forward.

1. I wrote really nice comments. Every comment I wrote under a defense used lots of loving emojis and included lots of small details about the art given to me. I also tried to compliment the artist's technical skill. This was EXTREMELY rewarding and fun to do. I got a lot of comments this year telling me that they're really happy with what I said!! An example: I told a user that his style was reminiscent of a high quality comic book cover, and he got really excited and told me his dream job was actually to make comics. Yay!!

2. I played with backgrounds and generally EXPERIMENTED more!! I've already mentioned this a ton of times on this blogpost, but I did so much playing around with different styles. It was so fun and genuinely made me realize that I can have a fluid style without compromising my artistic integrity. Side tangent, but I don't like when people complain how inconsistent their style is. It created a stigma (at least for me) about not having consistent art, which stopped me from realizing that having an inconsistent style - one that is constantly evolving based on new inspirations and techniques - is the POINT.

3. Keep interacting with friends and build mutuals. I'm very happy that I interacted with all my friends and mutuals from off-site. I also got some friends to try AF out this year, and I plan on bringing more next season, heehee.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. It took me a few hours to put this blogpost together, so I'm going to eat a nice slice of pizza and work on some other drawings I've been meaning to get to. See ya!