ArtFight Retrospective - 8/3/23

My last journal entry on here ended with the sentence: "I am going to go take a nice long break now and hopefully just dink around with ArtFight for a month," and like, LMAO. If you had asked me at the beginning of July if I wanted to do 20 art trades in the span of 31 days I'd be like "you're insane," but that is what I functionally ended up doing.

I do usually end up hiding my characters for at least a week of AF in order to play catch up, but I ended up having to do it for two-thirds of the month this year, and that was kind of a bummer. I think I'm going to need to do something differently next year. My brain can't handle the stress of receiving 15 attacks in the span of a weekend. "Just don't aim for a 100% revenge rate," you say. But I physically cannot bear the thought of disappointing people I know and random teenagers on the internet.

I intentionally held off on uploading Amelia's refs just to prevent this sort of thing, but it still ended up happening worse than ever, to the point that I couldn't justify uploading her publicly at all. I never advertise my account either so I've just found myself constantly going, "why was it like this???" My best guess is that I drew too many conventionally pretty anime girls and they served as inadvertent advertisements for my account on other people's profiles in an exponential way.

I do have a sneaking suspicion that an ENTIRE friend group attacked me though. Have not been able to shake the mental image of a single teen going to their group discord and going "LOOK WHAT I GOT FROM THIS PERSON" and the results that ensued. I got steamrolled this event, but this is at least a nice mental image.

Okay got the gripes out of the way. Moving on to the fun stuff.

I actually got at least ONE drawing of every character (except Amelia. Sorry Amelia). This has never actually happened before, even before I uploaded my homely potato guys. Nobody drew Aldis last year, but this year he was my most drawn character heheh. I even got a pic of En!

A big benefit of actually having my stories at least partially released is that I've been receiving more in-character stuff the last two times around; the ones with characters interacting with each other fill me with especially good feelings. I had a random person who read my VN draw nearly the ENTIRE CAST for me. Really disrupted my view that "3 people read my updated VN." I apparently have no object permanence for readers who read it and don't say anything. Going to have to get into the habit of reminding myself they do, in fact, exist.

I also had one person ask if they could make my drawing for them into stickers for personal use. This is really delightful to imagine. I wish I would have thought to ask for pics.

Here's some of my favorite drawings from this time around!


Drew this one right out the gate. Probably going to end up being one of my best drawings of the year. I was so excited when I realized I had an excuse to draw giant lilies of the valley.


Drawn for my friend, Hex. I really wanted to go all-out with this one 'cuz they've drawn quite a few nice things for me over the years, but had to reign it in 'cuz of time constraints. >_< Still pretty happy with it, though.


Flaming skulls are unexpectedly very fun to draw. Drawing this made me realize I need to draw with Promare Pink more often. Really fun.


Drawn for Kale. :) Think it's pretty funny I accidentally ended up with a Super Mario color scheme. Eternally apologetic that I have no idea how to draw isopods.

And now for the true purpose of this journal...to show off some of the stuff I received!!!!!!
(You better stick around!!!! Look at them!!!!!!!!)

((Images link to the artists))


It was a good year for the DDD kids.


It was also a good year for their hot grandma.

I made an offhand joke on my profile about drawing Aldis in a maid outfit (I was sad that no one drew his homely potato ass last year). So of course people actually did it.



I now have this wonderful little collection of Aldis Maids. (Whenever I look at the ones with exposed legs all I can think is: "he's going to get so cold...")


Also received a lovely non-maid of him :D

Still kinda stunned by this one ;_; Millie's face kills me. He's *clenches fist* so stupid.



Miraculously un-snapped-in-half Switch


Lena's >:3 face gets me every time I look at this.


*POINTS ENTHUSIASTICALLY AT MY EMO GUY*

Only one pic of Aster this year but it was a GOODIE.