Art Fight 2025: Or How I Learned To Love My CSP Tools

Friday, August 1st 2025

Art Fight 2025 has concluded, and while we wait for the final tally to determine which team has won (let’s go Crystal!), I’m sitting down to write a little post-mortem of the experience. This year was my second time participating, and my goal was to get comfortable with a bunch of new CSP brushes I downloaded, while practicing dynamic poses!

When I first got into Art Fight in 2024, I was stuck in a huge art block. I hadn’t draw digitally in years, and the most I’d been doing since was technical costume sketches in pencil. My only really consistent OC was an ill-fated Tabletop RPG character whose campaign crumbled after a falling out, so when I participated in 2024 I awkwardly created a new characters, scrounged together refs within a few days, and went on to draw 20 attacks! Drawing other people’s OCs felt good, and it was a fun challenge that didn’t burn me out as art usually does. Art Fight came and went, and I basically didn’t draw anything for a whole year after that. Oops!

This time around, I prepared my reference sheets early. I cleaned up my OC list, archiving the ones I didn’t get attached to. I kept around my liminal monster clown Bibo, my inflatable rescue robot Boba, and Kangadex, my Pokémon OC. I added a few more characters to the list that actually had time to marinate in my brain, rounding out a solid 6 characters for people to choose from. Added were Scratch the Scaredy Cat (a Sonic OC), Nullref (the spooky creepypasta dog I made a partial of last year), and Soda Pop (a vaporwave beach kitty character I was that was admittedly last minute enough to just have a single quick ref).

My little experiment this year was giving people no instructions beyond the permissions and seeing which characters would interest people. I also made heavy use of the bookmarks to save up a bunch of characters to draw so I could hit the ground running when the event started! The new folders were super helpful in sorting everybody out in categories to streamline the art process.

This year, I drew up a massive 55 attacks! More than double last year’s, almost triple! I focused a lot on Sonic OCs, which definitively sped things up as I picked up the motions. By the end I was blazing through characters and my style refined to something I enjoy much more! I started getting pretty comfortable with my brushes and experimented a lot, and now I have a couple favourites. In the interest of not busting my hosting limits, here’s a few of my favourite pieces I drew! You can check out my Art Fight if you want to see the rest in bigger resolution.

I also received 29 art pieces in return, the majority of which were revenges! Seeing my OCs drawn by other people is still such a trippy experience and it’s what made me fall in love with Art Fight initially. I love the experience of exchanging art and making new internet buddies through it! It feels unfair picking favourites when so many warm my heart to look at, so in the interest of my hosting space I picked one art of each OC for you to marvel at and strongly reccommend heading to Art Fight to check the others out! (and discover a bunch of awesome artists, wink nudge.)

So, what did I learn this year? I’ve got a better grasp on what I like drawing, first of all. There’s a couple arts that ended up just becoming scrapped sketches or half-finished linearts ‘cause my heart really wasn’t into it. I want to carry this lesson into next year to not to feel obligated to revenge or draw characters from people who followed me. I also learned it’s ok not to put the same amount of energy into every attack! It sounds mean on paper, but trying to give everyone a big, fullbody shaded art with background was a bit of a burnout risk. I think I just like the novelty of doing more attacks than huge projects, and some of my favourite pieces are ones I ended up downscaling on (some legs were chopped!) I learned a couple new tricks on CSP too, and added some new keybindings on my art tablet, which really streamlined the process and saved my wrist! By the end my skill level just skyrocketed; look at the difference between Soda Pop’s original reference and her new one!

So... who won in my experiment I mentionned earlier? Well... It’s a three way tie! Scratch, Nullref and Soda Pop all got eight art pieces featuring them. There’s a few factors in my opinion; knowing most of them are revenges, targeting mostly Sonic and Horror OCs was probably a big factor, alongside the characters being featured on my profile with a little New Character section I put up. They’re also relatively simple designs as well (well, Scratch and Soda Pop are), which might make them a bit more approachable than Bibo. Speaking of them, my lovely clown-beast got five art pieces! It’s heartwarming to me that people still appreciate them, they’re one of my favourite OCs to date. Boba got one attack from a beloved Tumblr mutual, and it makes me so excited someone else thought he was cool! I had considered archiving him since he’s one of my weirder OCs, but I’m glad I didn’t.

Kangadex, however, didn’t get a single attack. I’m a bit surprised, since I kept her around to have some “fandom” reps as part of that whole “see what people like” experiment. It’s not a big deal, though, since I wasn’t super attached to her and mostly kept her around for the experiment. Now that the event’s over and I won’t accidentally remove her while someone is mid-drawing, I can safely archive her. Maybe I’ll make another Pokémon OC someday I’m more attached to. Sweet dreams, Kangadex!

As the dust settles once again on another Art Fight, I’m grateful for all the people I met while exchanging art! Now I’m following a bunch of cool artists I discovered throughout the event. I’m already setting up a couple bookmarks for characters I’d love to attack next year (if they’re still up!) before leaving the account to hibernate for the year. (I can picture myself sweeping the confetti off the streets as I speak.) I’ve got a bunch of cool art of my characters, which is really motivating me to setup that OCs section on this website I was thinking of making to feature a few of these. And now that I have a better grasp on my digital art tools, I think I might keep making art for myself throughout the year. Seeing everyone’s awesome takes on my characters really got me chomping at the bit to draw nicer full scenes of them. I drew one with Scratch during the event at some point and now I really want to show people what’s going on in that brain of mine.

See you next year on the Art Fight frontlines!

Nullref by cetteSara

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