We came, we saw, we (Fist-A-)conquered

In its early days, one of the incentives to begin this blog was a popular drawing-game site being run at the time, called 'Fist-a-cuffs.' Created by comic artist and illustrator, Sam Hiti, 'Fist-a-cuffs' was a blog that welcomed artists to submit their own wholly original character designs to be pitted against other artist's designs. The two characters would then 'fight' via votes left in the comments section of each post. It was great fun, and a really good exercise in design.Today unfortunately the site has now long since been abandoned, though you can still browse through previous matches posted to it (I highly recommend).
This past semester, my friend Evan Larson and I taught a character design class at a local art school called Montserrat. There we thought it'd be fun to resurrect this concept as an extracurricular drawing challenge for our students. We deemed the series of matches, a 'Montserr-all-out-brawl.' Like the original, it saw some really wild and fun character designs and was great to see the concept raised from the dead. Above is an original drawing Evan and I did for the grand prize winner of the contest, Corinne. You can see her designs and many more of our students work at our class blog, here.
Another of my students, Mike appropriated the concept for his final project, where he designed every character, pitting them against each other for his fellow classmates to vote on. Again, a lot of fun.
It all came around full circle, and got me to reminiscing about the original 'Fist-a-cuffs' site. Here are some pages from my old sketchbooks, where I'm sketching out possible fighter designs. Hope you like!



Happy Holidays everybody!