Crafted By Colette

At the end of June, SamBeAwesome tweeted about something called Art Fight.

It intrigued me, but I ignored it. Then at the start of July she posted again.

This time I had to go investigate.

Art Fight is an annual month-long art trading game. It’s essentially “draw this in your style” en masse. You upload characters to your account. Everyone is sorted into two teams, and you attack the other team by drawing one of their characters.

I promptly signed up. Well, I say prompt. I was a couple of days late. The event runs for the whole month of July. This year ran a week later because there were a LOT of server issues with the website at the start of the month.

It was a lot of fun. There are hundreds and thousands of characters on the website. It’s not just the characters uploaded this year, but all the characters ever uploaded. It would have been impossible to browse them all (although I may be attempting to do that before next year), but I flipped though some pages, skipped a few hundred pages, flipped through a few more. There’s also a “random user” option, and a “random character” option. I quickly had a list of characters to attack.

I did some painting, some markers, some digital. I did a LOT. I ended up making 69 attacks by the end of the run. It would have been 70, but I was a minute late posting the last one.

The number of points you earn for each attack depends on several things. The size: have you drawn head/bust, or full body, for example. The finish: is it a sketch, is it lined?. The colour: is it uncoloured, roughly coloured, or fully coloured?. The shading: none, simple, complex. The background: have you left no background, just a simple pattern, full complicated scene?. There are also different levels of animation that earn different points, but these didn’t apply to what I was doing.

The most points I earned was for this one: Onyo by JustALittleBean.  He earned 13.59 points.

The piece I did that earned the least points was Marshmallow by MareOnTheMoon.  He earned just 2.1 points.  But he is fairly simple.

Technically the pieces that earned me the least points were the friendly fire attacks.  Friendly Fire is when you attack someone on your own team.  They earn zero points and I submitted 10 of them – I just couldn’t resist the cutes.

Two of my friendly fire attacks did earn some points.  Bean Cat by NekoCaroline.  I was so frustrated with my first attempt that I did another one.  And then another one.  Apparently when you attack the same character twice as friendly fire you get 0.25 points.  And when you attack it a third time you get 0.5 points.

My average points per attack was 5.51 – but that includes the friendly fires.  If I only include attacks that actually earned points the average goes up to 7.45, which I feel is pretty decent.

There were a few pieces I did that I’m really super chuffed with.  Like Erin by KenTheSparkleLord, Margaret Elizabeth Snakehatcher by GroverMask, Stimna by Sallymander and Agin by Retof.

And there are some that I feel I could have done a much better job of.  Like BeepBoop by ZenfulCartoons, Scixie by Pandaili, Blueberry by Wisdomstar and Nessie by Peu_dirt.

I have to share this one too.  I’m quite pleased with it, but I’m sharing it cos the character is called Colette.  How could I not draw her?  She’s by Closmos by the way.

You can see all of the attacks I made on my Deviant Art page.  You can have a look at my Art Fight page too, but I think you need an account to see it.

I was attacked too.  A whole bunch of times actually, which surprised me.  I had uploaded three characters.  Patch, Effy and Wren.

So who won?  It was really close for most of the month.  One moment Dream Team (my team) were in the lead, the next it was Nightmare.  A couple of days before the close there were literally only 28 points difference.  But the final result was a loss for Dream Team.

Team Nightmare won with 2,044,246 to Dream Team’s 2,029,075.

The results were announced in this post on the Art Fight website.  Which includes some really astounding stats. For instance, the attack that did the most damage was one by Sunminny called Wormy Night.  It contained 3296 characters and earned 16,651 points.  Seriously, go look.

As incredible as that was, it really knocked me for six.  I was proud of my achievements, until I read that.  I had several moments of doubt about my work.  I didn’t really read the rest of the news post.  It was too offputting.  But I AM proud of my achievements, even if next year I’m going to try pieces with multiple characters.

At the bottom of that post though there are some other stats.  Nightmare submitted a total of 183,397 attacks and Dream Team submitted 185,660.  So we submitted more – which is sort of a win.

The person who submitted the most attacks was Sixbane, who submitted more than 1300.  Which is just insane!

I had a lot of fun doing Art Fight, and I’m definitely going to do it again next year.  I’m in the process of scrolling through all 17,000+ pages of characters (each page has 30 characters on it), to build up my bookmark list.  And also to find some robots to draw for my challenge this year.