How I Reached my Art Fight 2025 Goals

This year's art fight my goals were 30 attacks, including 5 big attacks and 5 mech attacks. I met my goals comfortably then decided to spend the last half a day pushing out even more art for a total of 42 attacks.

The best way I've found to meet my art fight goals after the 10 events I've participated in, other than having free time and sticking to a schedule, has been to teach myself how to make art speedily all the time. Art, like most activities, gets faster with first-time accuracy. No undo, no erase, no backspace, no restart. This is, understandably, an intimidating ask if you aren't confident in your work, which is exasperated by making art for someone else, especially if you happen to like their art.

So, how can I overcome my art insecurities and trust my ability to create? I practice, not full pieces, but instead every line and every shape, every 3D form. If I find myself rotating my canvas or repeating a line too many times, I know I need to draw more straight lines, in all different directions, outside of making anything else, just lines. It might seem silly, after all a line is a line no matter what it takes to draw it, but when art is composed of so many strokes being able to shave time off of each one really adds up. It's important to note that a lot of the long lines in my art are actually 2 lines, this also improves speed because a longer stroke is easier to mess up and simply bridging 2 lines is much faster than redoing the whole thing. Shapes are composed of lines, and 3d forms of shapes, and, most importantly, art is comprised of all 3. So practicing these things, recognizing the need to practice such fundamentals, ultimately results in faster art.

How I Practice

I have randomizers that give me one of these at a time until I'm done warming up or practicing, but sometimes I choose what to do instead.

• Lines

  I practice drawing lines by drawing them straight up to down, down to up, left to right, and right to left, as well as diagonally lower left to upper right, lower right to upper left, upper left to lower right, and upper right to lower left. I often repeatedly draw lines, changing directions as I go, until I cover my digital canvas or physical page. The goal isn't speed, it's consistency, the more confident I am the faster I will go naturally.
  
  

• Shapes

  For shapes I practice more than just basics. Of course I'll draw stuff like squares, circles, hexagons, and triangles but I also focus on stars, hearts, and organic shapes I might describe as pears or peanuts. Anything I can find the words for that doesn't seem excessively complicated. I'll draw whatever the shape is multiple times, with different line directions, in different sizes, until I feel more confident drawing it than when I started.
  
  

• Forms

  Like shapes, with forms I draw them with different line directions, but also from different angles. Spheres, pyramids, cones, cubes, boxes, I often skip anything detailed or organic but the basics are there.
  
  

• Cut Outs and Additions

  This one is a bit different, and has less obvious uses. I practice drawing forms with shapes cut out, as holes but also over edges and around corners. I draw forms with other forms attached in similarly varied ways. Drawing more complicated form and shape interactions like these has a couple of benefits, firstly, I find it much more entertaining because of the inherent variety so I can do this longer without getting bored, secondly, it helps me better understand 3D space, and thirdly, it pushes me to draw lines in more specific directions, lines with purpose and meaning, which is ultimately what makes up art, intentional strokes.

I really wanted to make an art fight blog post now that it's over for the year, but before the winner gets announced so it still feels fresh. A lot of my writing takes research and drafting, I love that, but it's been fun to just write about myself without worrying too much for accuracy, etc. Here is my art fight if you're curious, thanks for reading!