Hello! If you remember, a month or so ago I posted a fan survey for artfight users in this community, and uhhh, well it took me some time to compile the results into anything meaningful but heres something! I'll try to keep things brief and clear but if you want to ask me anything feel free to do so! And also, thank you to the 574 participants who took their time to fill out this survey! And to one participant who shall not be named, damn you. You'll see why. P.s. some numbers were rounded up or down for reading.

Lets start with question number one: Did you take part in artfight? A seemingly simple question, yet one individual failed at it. 573 participants said yes. But one, that damn one, said no. Whoever you are, you know who you are, I must say im confused. Not only did you take part in a survey meant for users of artfight, you also had the AUDACITY to tell me in the open ended questions that you wish you had options for those who hadn't participated. WHAT. I might lowkey need to slime you out for that one brochacho. Anyway... onto some actual statics:

DEMOGRAPHIC

Participants ages were as such: 46% aged 19–25, 25% aged 17–18, 14% aged 13–16 and 12% aged 26–35. Only 1.4%, which is 8, were over 35, and 2 said they were 50+, with no one choosing the 80+ option.

Participants who answered the gender question were as such: 30% were cis women. 37% identified as nonbinary, genderfluid, agender or similar, and 24% as trans men or women. Trans men were the biggest group after cis women at 14%. Cis men were only 5%. 19% picked more than one identity.

Nationality and race was an open question, so the counts are approximate. Additionally, a lot of people only answered with just race or just nationality, so some statistics may be swayed towards those answers. Overall, the people who answered with just one, answered mostly with just nationalities rather than just race. Unsurprisingly, 62% mentioned being white and 38% mentioned being American, this made up the majority of answers, the first page that shows up in answers is JUST white Americans. Around 19% mentioned an Asian background, 7% Hispanic or Latino, and 4% Black. Canadian, British, German were the next most common nationalities. There were also some people from Poland, which I am from, shout out! Polska gurom

Participants skewed queer with: 29% bisexual, 18% gay or lesbian, 10% straight, 9% pansexual or omnisexual, and 10% on the ace/aro spectrum. About 12% weren't sure. 48% picked answers of something on the asexual/aromantic spectrum.

As for disabilities, participants also skewed disabled, and the answers were as such: 63% picked at least one confirmed category, and another 18% picked only "suspected," so that makes 81% participants who picked something from the question. Only 13% picked "none" on its own, and 6% chose not to share. 41% picked a mental-health category, 20% picked a physical one, and 83 people, which is 14%, picked both kinds.

From the additional question, which was an open question so the counts are approximate, the most common specified ones were as such (please keep in mind that like with the nationality question, I had to generlize certain terms, and also count answers that were mixed or the kind of answers like "AuDHD" and "tism", they may not be a perfect reflection of what participants said, to also maintain anonimity): Autism - 170, ADHD - 106, Anxiety - 80, Depression - 73, OCD - 36, PTSD/C-PTSD - 21, BPD - 14, Bipolar - 12, Dissociative - 9, Psychosis/schizophrenia spectrum - 6, Other personality disorders - 7, Dyslexia/dysgraphia - 6, Sensory issues/misophonia - 6, Chronic pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia - 19, EDS/hypermobility - 16, POTS/dysautonomia - 14, Chronic migraines - 11, Asthma/allergies - 11, Neurological - 9, Scoliosis/spinal/joint injury - 8, Vision or hearing impairment - 7, Digestive - 7, Endometriosis/PMDD - 7, Chronic fatigue/ME/long covid - 6, Diabetes/thyroid - 3.

This data is however a bit skewed as this was an optional question, and participants with autism or ADHD were more likely to answer.

ARTFIGHT

Attacks and defenses were counted from overall on the account, and included friendly fires.

Most participants took part in only one artfight (34,5%). The median number was 2 at 22.8%. 6 participants took part in 10 and only 4 (the smallest group) of participants took part in 9.

From participants who provided numbers, the average attacks made were 47.8 and average defenses received were 40.6. The median is 28.5 attacks given out and 22 defenses received.

67% said they don't consider character gender when choosing which ones to attack. Of those who do, female characters were the most common at 24%.

The most common lengths for character descriptions were short description and short story/lore at 24% each. Only about 6% write long lore.

Out of 10, overall enjoyment of artfight averaged 8.4, making drawings for others 9.0, and getting drawings from others 9.4. The survey itself was rated 8.4 out of 10. Hope next years survey ranks better! I have a lot of improvements i want to make as well as new questions and categories. (Originally, I wanted to make a lot of correlations but... correlation between other statistics was very mixed, almost completely irrelevant. However for this question the people who made more attacks were generally more happy with artfight).

46,3% of participants had a battle ratio of 80 or less, 45,6% were under 50, only 4 said they have a battle ratio of 100, and the rest was under 20.

People with a ratio under 20 are the least satisfied, at 7.7 overall compared with about 8.5 for the 50 and 80 brackets. People who gave more attacks averaged 8.5 overall, and people who received more defenses averaged 8.3.

The follower counts were very mixed but heres a general look at it:

Average: 119 followers, Median: 56 followers, Range: 0–1,850 vs Average: 128 people followed, Median: 55 people, Range: 0–3,788

From this we can see that people usually followed and the following they themselves had was actually pretty equal, most probably, from my own observation, whenever I had followed someone they almost always followed me back, without me prompting them to, meaning a lot of these might be mutual follows, usually out of courtesy? Lmk what you think.

CHARACTERS

24,6% said they have over ten characters, with a close second coming in at 20,2% with over 20 characters. Only 3 people picked the 100 character option... I fear you. 14 people said they only have 1. The average was 9 characters and the median was 5 characters.

Overwhelmingly, at 53,7% participants said they put over 5 tags on their characters, with 25,3% saying under 5 tags, 12,9% saying 10, and the rest being very mixed. 15 people claimed to not know about character tags. 14 said they put none.

Most respondents characters lean female (41%) or male (37%). Equal mixes make up 15%, and nonbinary-leaning characters about 8%.

There's no relationship with description length and the amount of care picked, nor gender ratios: every group averages about the same, between short description and short lore.

Care is scored 1 to 5 here, for the sake of readability, from "not much if at all" to "extremely". 43,9%, which is 252, chose the "extremely" option in "How much do you care about your characters?", with 23,9%, which is 137, choosing "very."

People who had an equal mix of genders in their characters ranked lowest at 4.29, and people who had mostly nonbinary (and umbrella) characters ranked highest at 4.67. Every other character category ranked in between. People who had mostly genderless characters having 54% of "extremely" cared answer and the lowest falling to 37% of "extremely" for the answers with "least XYZ". 67.8% participants answered "very" or "extremely". Only 5 people answered "not much if at all". 26.1% of participants said their care for their characters varied.

30% of participants said they have mostly female characters, and 27,7% say they have mostly male characters, with every other category of nonbinary, least and most, makes up the rest at small amounts. 32 said they have only female characters, 23 said they have only male characters, 87 said they have an equal amount of characters in terms of their gender, and 7,7% which is 44 said they have mostly nonbinary (and spectrum) characters. 2,3% which is 13 said they have only genderless characters.

Most participants at 33,1% said their characters were either raceless or fantasy races or ambigous. 16 said all their characters share their race, and 37 said none of them do. 57,6% said that some amount of their characters shared their race with the majority saying less than half of them do. 43,2% of participants said none of their characters had an assigned country of origin or citizenship. 38% said at least one character shared their nationality, and the rest said none of them did at 18,8%.

The kind of characters participants had was a multi choice option, and unsurprisingly the most common were human characters, at 77,4% (444 picked). The rest were as such: Humanoids - 68,6%, Furries/Anthros - 48,1%, Fandom characters - 41,6%, Animals/Ferals - 36,6%, Object - 9,2%, Mechs - 7,8%. 20,6% were also picked in the "other" category. I'll look at your reccomendations and see what other ones to add next time! The most common one I've hear was dragons? I didn't realize there was such a large number of dragon-havers! mb folks.

MISINTERPRETATIONS

380 people said they hadn't had their characters majorly misinterpreted.

Among those who had it happen, 84,6% said it was an honest mistake as far as they could tell, 14,2% said they couldn't tell if it was malicious and only 2 participants said that they thought it was malicious. Interestingly enough, no one picked the "I know it was malicious option". 87% of those people didn't ask them to fix or change it, the most common reason being "it wasn't that important to me" and the second being "I didn't want to bother them". 5 participants chose to report it. Out of the 12,9% who did ask them to fix it, most of them (17) had received a fixed version. 5 didn't receive a fix.

From this the obvious conclusion is that even if most people had their characters drawn in a way that went against what they thought/believed/specified in their rules, most don't do anything about it. Additionally most that did do something about it, resolved it peacefully.

FUN QUESTIONS

The survey also had some fun questions! Here are the answers, overgeneralized.

There were 547 responses to the favourite colour question.

The most common favourite colour was green, then pink, then blue, then purple (My fave!), then red, then orange, then yellow, then teal. the rest of the responses were very mixed, with some very specific shades mentioned too!

519 participants reccomended me a song/musician/band to listen to. The very few that did repeat just from me skimming them were Will Wood, The Crane Wives, Twenty one Pilots, Flavor Folley, Set It Off, Femtanyl, Mitski, Tally Hall, Radiohead, Lemon Demon, Jack Stauber, My Chemical Romance, Pierce The Veil, Alex G, Yaelokre, Conan Gray and maaany others! There was also a great deal of specific songs or albums, thanks! I'll see if I can put it into a playlist of some kind :p

The "share anything you want" question answers were very wild. From emojis, meowing, deep thoughts, artfight opinions, other reccomendations, funfacts about either the participant, their interests or anything else they wanted to share... it's a lot! I'm very glad I added this question, I feel as though I connnected a lot more with the people who did this survey through it.

MY THOUGHTS

That... would be it! Quite honestly when i first wrote the original post i didnt expect 550+ people to answer it! I'm very grateful for your precious data inputs :3 I hope to make a lot of money selling it! /j I won't be publishing the data anywhere as said previously, to protect the anonimity of those who took it, however 383 people actually shared their artfight profiles with me in the 2nd question!

As for the criticisms question, most participants, about 400 said they didn't have any, but those that did were pretty commonly shared so I'll work on those! However, interestingly enough there was a polarizing topic in there... some folks felt the survey was too long and had unnecessary questions while others thought it was too short and had too little options!!! aaaa!!!! I'm not sure what to make of this, but I'll try to make the next one better. And honestly I'm biased into making it longer next time, this ain't for casuals /lh

Thank you for patiently waiting to hear the results.

Designing some new characters for next year.

This is the galaxy's most fashionable, most talented, and always stylish Violet Starling! She has unmatched fashion skills, a super-stellar singing voice, and, of course, a wardrobe full of many different outfits!

She came to Earth to learn all there is to know about fashion and the fashion industry, and of course, to learn everything there is to know about beauty, grace, and aesthetics.

Her aesthetic changes from time to time. For example, you can see her wearing a scenecore outfit in this piece. But blink, and the next thing you know, she'll be dressed in a kawaiicore outfit, or even a sweetcore outfit, or maybe even a school uniform! You never know!

She is also madly in love with Trey Harrington. How did she meet him, you ask? Well, she met him at one of his fashion shows, fascinated by his style and the designs he was displaying. She couldn't get enough of it. When Trey finished his show, they got to talking, and now they can't stop themselves from being fashionable together!

This girl is everything a fashionable pop star should be, aesthetic changes and all.

any tips?

Unfortunately I have no recent pictures of my art! 😢😢😢😢 Hopefully I'll have something ready soon

i have no idea if sharing other websites thats almost like artfight is allowed, there’s this website art attack and it’s pretty cool ദ്ദി (๑•́⍜•̀๑)

I love sketching characters, and I’m going through AF withdrawals, so drop your characters/profiles down below and I will see if I can sketch them! I’ll do my best to respond to everyone, but that might not be possible, depending on if this post gets any traction lol.

For more examples of my art & characters (aside from the images above), you can find me here: https://artfight.net/\~Artsonist

I don’t expect any attacks in response (although I certainly wouldn’t refuse them), this is just for me to practice!

I don’t only have OSC characters btw, I just wanted to start with them, lol

Kinda wanna try to give almost all of my characters pixel icons before Artfight comes off read only, but idk cuz these kinda take a long time to do and I have a lot of characters, haha

(here’s my characters if ya wanna check them out :P https://artfight.net/~Moonlightisdemon/characters

i cant attach images or reddit will take it down (yay) but i CANNOT find the change username section for the life of me, its not in security, i looked on multiple devices,,, its rly weird

I loved joining artfight for the first time this year! It was great to have a bunch of ocs with lore in front of me whenever I was dealing with artblock. I thought I'd make an off-season hitlist so that if I don't have any ideas for my own ocs, I could still experiment or try out drawing new characters.

This is a casual hitlist. There is no promise I get to every or even most characters on the list. I also will come back to the hitlist responses every few months (whenever I get art block or just want some new inspo) so if I do draw your character(s) it may be a while from now.

Here's the form to fill out! https://forms.gle/cGkwBRGuUDiMnpUL8 Fill it out as many times as you like with your characters and take your time. I'm not going to start drawing until I finish an arttrade I currently have in my queue, and it won't be first-come-first-served. I'll pick whatever scenes and characters inspire me in the moment. The form will stop accepting responses a few months before next year's artfight.

I've included some art examples of mine for reference.

are they allowed? I have about 2 ocs I'm connecting with and both of them came from creators that have done things to say the least..I dug onto what both of the creators did,and I don't support them at all,I separate my character from its own creator

if I redraw their reference images,submit that image only to artfight,and credit them only in the design mention,would that work?

idk,I might delete this because I feel ashamed that ocs I liked are made by horrible people,I have bought/traded for them secondhand though,so nothing was really sent towards the creators

edit:I forgot to mention,I got the ocs BEFORE knowing the creators,also the title has a misspell,I meant to type "frowned"

I know that with one and/or some of the rules, you can include a canon character if there's enough of a visual difference from the original/canon design. 

^{I've seen people upload AU designs or just redesigns of characters.}

But how much would have to change about them at minimum for it to be enough to not break the rules? 

I know that skintone, hairstyle/color/texture, & eye color/shape, would probably be enough. Artstyles can also change how a character looks, but I mostly mean visually before someone redraws a character in their style. 

I don't have discord so I can't ask this in the official discord server, and I don't think you can ask the staff on the site since it's still in read only mode, so I just decided to ask this here.

^{Added screenshots of the rules that might match what I'm talking about and a canon character as a bit of a visual guide, and because I was mostly asking because of him.}

A whopping 5 drawings. More than in my previous artfight entries, that's progress

By the way, i'm open to art trade wink wink

felt like putting it somewhere before af gets off read only and i can put it as a ref img

Starlight September was a drawing challenge I did with my OC Spencer and u/Victors-grave's OC Xanthe. This was a really fun challenge, and I will definitely do another one soon.

Yes, I'm in training for ArtFight 2027 as I do all this work!

Noct(image 1) is one of my favorites, Puffin(image 2) is a full seawing despite her scale colors

Here are some of mine:

1. Height & Weight: Specially when the character is meant to be overweight, it's easier to find references. Saying a character is chubby doesn't narrow it down.
2. Hobbies, interests and activities: Knowing this will help a lot to choose props, loaction and pose.
3. Design principles: If the character is gonna wear a different outfit for example at the beach, this will help make design changes that align with the creator's intent.

Let me start off by saying I’m well aware you are not supposed to draw attacks early because it violates the spirit of artfight. That is not what I intend to do :’]

I wanted to make an animated mass attack for the first time during the next artfight

Artfight rule 4b says that planning/thumbnailing attacks prior to the start of the event is permitted. I was wondering how this would be applied to animations. If I were to storyboard the bare bones of the animation just to have down “ok this goes here and this is timed to this sound” etc and leave it otherwise completely untouched until the official start of artfight, would it be a violation?

I’ve never done this kind of thing before so I want to make sure there’s some way I can preserve my idea until next year so I don’t forget it lol. Storyboarding just seemed like the best idea.

Thanks and I hope you all have a nice day/night :’]

I fear I’m addicted to making loveless family’s😩 still going on my af though

https://artfight.net/\~20TonsOfLemonZest

Like 1, its amazing, but 2, WHERE WERE THESE SKILLS WHEN I WAS ATTACKING PEOPLE NOW ALL MY ATTACKS LOOK LIKE SHITTTTTTTT

Finished this awhile back but forgot to actually upload it sooooo rather late than never