I participated in Art Fight for the first time this year. It was a good time, and I think I learned a thing or two from it. I'd like to give somethoughts on it the same way I did for Inktober last year.

I had wanted to do Art Fight last year, but ultimately decided against it because I didn't think I'd have the time or skill. It's a scary thought to put your art out there for others. Doubly so when you're making something for someone specific, and especially someone you don't know that well. But I made the commitment to participate this year, and participate I did. Like many art challenges, it's good to have a goal in place so you can track your progress over the month. I picked an intentionally low goal because this was my first year: five non-sketch pieces of which two should be for people I didn't know (neither friends nor artists I followed). My stretch goal was double the total number: 10 pieces. (Spoiler: I didn't meet the stretch goal but I did meet my primary goal!) All of this was announced when I posted my Art Fight card to FurAffinity.

I'd read that the AF site usually goes down for the first few days, and I didn't want to be stuck without ref sheets, so I did some prep work the week beforehand. I got my list of "unknown" targets by checking the "artfight" tag on FA one afternooon and picking a few people who had a record of attacking others last year. I didn't really care about getting revenges or not - I just wanted to attack people who were likely to participate at all and not just looking for free art. Once I had a list of potential targets, I downloaded their refs and screenshotted the character information + rules for each.

I won't go into detail on each attack since that's best suited for the individual uploads. If you'd like to see all of the attacks I made plus the attacks I recieved, you can search for anything I've posted with the art_fight or art_fight_2025 tags. Here's a pre-made search for it (thanks to FA implementing the new search system). Note: At time of posting this, I have not uploaded all of the pieces. PostyBirb is scheduled to upload them all within the next week or so.

There were two major hinderances to my plan:

1. I spent about a week or so with my attention split between AF and practicing fundamentals. While the practice was good, especially for doing the values on one of the attacks, it did majorly cut into my time and attention to making new attacks.
2. I got very sick early in the month. Not hospital-level sick, but sick enough that I didn't even have the energy to photograph an already-finished piece. I'm only now getting past the coughing fits that it left me with after all the other symptoms faded.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with my participation this year. I learned that I can get enjoyment from making pieces for others and it isn't quite as scary as I'd originally thought to share your own works. I don't know what my life will be like in 2026 around the time of Art Fight. I'd like to participate again if I can, and bump up my goal to six pieces instead of five.