#maybe i can participate in artfight this year after all then! i think... maybe... possibly... (<- hasnt set up my profile yet)

[aria0fgold]

I'm fired up now. No more struggling, I'm going to finish this drawing before June 30th and I WILL MAKE IT HAPPEN!

[pine-niidles]

2024 July Monthly Update - Artfight

Another July gone by, another Artfight draws to a close. This month's update post will be primary looking at what I've made for Artfight, but first some personal updates:

I mentioned in my last post I was dealing with wrist pain but it was getting better. It got worse. The last few weeks of July I spent not moving my hands as much as I possibly could because both hands were feeling so bad. Luckily I managed to figure out the cause (I bought myself a wheeled bag to take stain off my back when grocery shopping, turns out wheeled bag + cobblestone streets = wrist destroying vibrations) and once I eliminated it my wrists started actually healing. They're feeling much better now, not fully healed but well on the way :) I'm just glad art wasn't the cause. With any luck this'll be the last monthly update this year with a 'personal circumstances' blurb at the start and I can get fully back to just making and talking about art ✨

Artfight

This year was my 8th year participating, which is kind of wild to think about. My first year was Sun vs Moon, on team moon and I drew 34 total art pieces. I don't think I've ever beat the number but I certainly got close this year having drawn 30 attacks!

I didn't have a specific plan going into artfight this year, I usually don't other than maybe a list of people I'd like to draw for. I treat artfight as a super low pressure way to experiment and draw fun designs. Not every piece comes out exactly how I want it but that's part of the fun and every year at least one artfight drawing makes it's way to my fav art that year. 

At the end of June I'd just made a template for doing these chibi icons and I was having so much fun with them I started off artfight doing a bunch of them for attacks:

I think they turned out super cute but they look a little awkward side by side due to the different dimensions of each one. I've yet to find a good way to display batches of them 😔

The first bigger drawing I did was of a character I found in my bookmarks and I love how it turned out:

It was the perfect piece to break the last shackles of my artblock away and drawing it felt smooth as butter. I didn't really do anything similar the rest of the month but there's several points on how I lined and colored this one that I'm keeping in mind to experiment more with in the future. 

After the first piece I was feeling in a more environmental mood and freehanded these two attacks featuring characters in funky landscapes.

My wrists were still feeling pretty iffy at this point so the lines for both of these were a very loose first pass over a rough sketch but to be honest I don't think anyone would notice unless I pointed it out. 

I really thought I'd do more in this style but 🤷‍♂️ it ended up not happening. Maybe I'll do something with some ocs soon

The last three attacks I got out before my wrists got too bad to draw I did all in the same day

These two characters were exactly my type & I love to draw chibis on some kind of environmental base or prop so I wanted to do something with that this artfight as well. I think they turned out pretty cute!

Another one with a base, this time more like a character standee that I love to give dnd characters. Physical character models moving around on a map is one of my favorite tactile experiences of tabletop games.

The last one I did before I had to take a couple week pause - I wanted to experiment around with linework specifically and while there's a lot I like about this drawing there's several things I had to rush or simplify because of my wrists and overall it didn't end up being the strongest piece. Ah well, that's how it sometimes.

The day after I did these I went grochery shopping again and then my wrists really gave out. I didn't draw anything for artfight from the 12th until the 29th when my hands were finally starting to feel good enough to try and do just a few last drawings before the end.

I started off simple with some blocky chibis with saturated lineart. I'd played with colorful lines in the past but I never ended up liking because having all the lineart be one bright color always felt too much and too distracting. However, earlier this month I saw this gorgeous attack by ebelcities which made my realize the extremely pointless arbitrary restriction I'd been putting on myself: you don't need to have ALL the lineart be a bright saturated color, of course you don't! How trivial! And yet this was a huge breakthrough. I have to thank ebelcities for having such beautiful art 🥰 Seeing her work is always sooo inspiring. 

I still didn't want to push my hands too much so my next attack was done mostly using the lasso tool, with a few textures added on top. This attack received the least attention on social media out of all of them but personally I'm pretty proud of it 🤍

In the last two days my hands were feeling MUCH better and I took advantage of that to try and reach my initial goal I had at the start of the month - 30 attacks to fill up a whole page on my all attacks section with attacks from this year. 

​I had 7 left to do - and I did it!

I wanted to keep them simple both of the sake of my hands (drinking game for this post - take a shot anytime I mentioned my wrists) and to actually finish 7 drawings in 2 days. But I also didn't want to just give people rough sketches, especially since most of these were revenges for some really lovely art I'd gotten. So I came up with the idea of A) a border template and B) using tones!

I've been really into dot tones recently but I've not really been using them as is the traditional method - it was a bit of a challenge doing them in these! Picking tones, getting a range of values, matching textures, getting the size of the dots right... so many decisions to make. I'll have to keep experimenting with them, maybe for some actual comics in the future :)

And that's it for this year's artfight. We'll be hearing the results soon but even before hearing them I think seafoam has probably lost haha, we've been lagging behind all month and I had a feeling this would happen when I saw the team numbers but I still love seafoam regardless <3 I'm looking forward to seeing what the teams will be next year!