#yearly art challenge #thoughts

on fiorebruary

March 03, 2026

done with my third month-long oc art challenge! if you haven't checked it out, go look at fiorebruary now. i am very proud of it. out of the past three i've done i've enjoyed it the most, it's probably my best one yet. it's a satisfying feeling being able to draw backgrounds and interesting lighting and actually like it.

for once, i find myself missing it after it's done. (i've been filling the hole in my heart with fiorethan doodles.) i'm not used to this. my past two challenges always ended in relief that it was over. there was a little bit of that "thinking you have an assignment doubl when it's summer" feeling for a few days, but never like this.

when i close my eyes, i think about thumbnailing and drawing lighting. when i go shower and apply my tgel i keep needing to remind myself that i can take my time, i don't need to rush back to my computer to draw. maybe 28 days is too short. maybe i want to draw more fiore scenes. maybe i miss seeing her scarred face and fiery red hair, her beautiful brown eyes staring back at me from the canvas. huh whuh what were we talking about

i hope this isn't too difficult to read! i did my best to write an outline and re-read this a few times but i tend to get very rambly. apologies.

the challenge

same challenge as usual: draw an OC every day for the entire month. this time, it's fiore! she's also the current featured OC if you want to know a little bit about her. i'm kind of obsessed with her. (this part is important and helps me stay motivated to draw the same character every day.)

i also use these challenges as an opportunity to try something new. in august august, i was learning color palettes, mood, and building my confidence to draw scenes. in ethantember, i was a bit more familiar with scenes and color palettes, and decided to go full send into backgrounds. these daily drawings are supposed to be quicker than a full piece, not-extremely-high effort, and done in one sitting as to make "trying something new" less overwhelming for myself.

with jujutsu kaisen season 3 airing and and largeonions' 100 days of arknights challenge [youtube] fresh in my mind, i settled with "movie stills" for fiorebruary (or at least, more scene-like and cinematic shots).

i love how the jjk epsiodes have been feeling like short films. there's so much detail and effort into the animation, the camera angles are great and there's a lot of symbolism i thought was cool (yuji walking in a sunny path while megumi walks in a path with shade, etc etc). even the op and ed are great, i dont skip them when i watch. the last anime i did that with was link click s1. jjk exudes love for art. the opening is filled with references to famous paintings, of course the animation is gorgeous as always. i havent even watched kill bill but i thought the references in episode 3 were hype as fuck. i'm really sad gosso isn't directing the next season!

if you've seen largeonions' challenge, you can probably see its influence on fiorebruary! her 100 days of arknights illustrations were cinematic depictions of moments in arknights stories, as a dedication to her favorite operator nian (who is a film director). i watched her 33/100 video a while back. a lot of it still sticks in my head, and is the reason why i'm doing a wide movie ratio and letting myself add tons of adjustment layers for fun lighting and mood.

fiorebruary was very different from past challenges. i went for higher effort pieces - averaging about 3 hours per piece, while with previous challenges i only aimed for 90 minutes. i wasnt as strict with my process as before, either. the main reasons for this were: 1) i wanted to make these look cinematic with pretty lighting, and 2) i wanted to print these out and not have them come out extremely tiny. i wanted to have some fun now and not restrict myself too much after practicing colors, composition, and storytelling and just apply what ive learned over the months.

the process

for each piece, i'd sketch out one thumbnail, maybe more if i could think of any. this usually takes 30 minutes to 1 hour (maybe one and a half?) depending on how detailed i want the thumb, and includes blocking out lighting to figure out the subjects and composition. i'd start timing my process once i transfer this over to the proper canvas size. i'm honestly not sure why i didnt count thumbnailing time in the time taken in the fiorebruary page.

i always start with drawing fiore. for some reason i draw her bangs first LOL. if the pose and background were simple enough i'd just go straight to lineart, if not i'd probably do 1-2 sketch passes. after lineart i fill tool the colors or fill the background with an underpaint color and block out major sections of color, then i base my palette around that and pick colors until something fits.

then comes shading and lighting. for highlights i usually just draw with a whitish yellow and mess around with "add" and "overlay" layers. for shadows i pick the colors myself and just do minor adjustments with multiply layers (mostly for darkening areas, but i dont really like using multiply for shadows because it can look kinda muddy).

if i remember to, i play around with a few brushes for texture (rake brush and alcohol marker, these are most visible in fiore's hair highlights). then i paint over to add loose hair strands and highhlights. and thats pretty much it. very simplified, but yeah. unfortunately i dont take timelapse videos because they take up too much space in my computer.

i forgot how fun adjustment layers are to use. i dont usually use these because i dont want to depend on them too much but damn its fun putting on filters on your art. theyre also so useful for glow effects.

the things ive learned

i learned how to draw cars! well ONE car. and i still have trouble with it but i've been getting faster at it. it's fun. i'm growing as an artist by learning to draw armor, cars, guns, backgrounds, etc.

i also learned i really like hard lighting and rim lighting. i love it when the light hits an object and it almost just blends into the bright area with no shadows or lines separating them. i was very heavily inspired by my mutual pandocrow [instagram], whose lighting i really admire.

fiorebruary gave me the opportunity to execute ideas, knowledge, and techniques ive been wanting to try for forever, but either never had a chance to or was too overwhelming because it had to be part of a "full piece". so of course, the solution is to make 28 of them with time pressure. i know it sounds kinda silly but drawing more with quicker artworks helps a lot more for my art than drawing less with higher quality pieces. quantity over quality etc etc, the more you fail the more you learn.

i remember two years ago i'd see compositions with a character in front of a big cloud and thinking, "wow, i wanna do that!" and finally being able to draw a piece last year during ethantember. ive been wanting to draw dappled light, rim lighting, blurred foregrounds, reflections on glass, and so many cool shots and stills. and i did it during fiorebruary! awesome.

full pieces that take more than a day still scare me, i guess thats just a constant with me and digital art. at least ive branched out a bit from my usual plain white backgrounds.

the other day my girlfriend asked how i can come up with all these scenes. i thought for a while. i was flattered by the compliment but at a loss for words: i actually dont know! i can't explain it, but ill just see it in my head and then sketch it down. i was pretty surprised she said that, knowing that she's the movie watcher between the two of us.

sometimes it takes me a while to think, but her prompts push me in the right direction to imagine a cool looking piece. despite how much time i spend thinking and worrying about drawing, most of my ideas come to me when i'm holding the pen. i'll start doing a thumbnail, then another idea will come to me in the middle of it, repeat this until i eventually come up with something i wanna go with. i've kind of always been like that though whenever i have a deadline. i always found that the idea of starting a creative project/art piece is a lot scarier than the act of starting it.

my god hard lighting is a cheat code to make art look pretty though. a lot of the pieces i mightve disliked are saved by hard light.

fiore

fiore kind of hit me like a truck. i drew her maybe last year january. come march, she was already taking over my mind.

the file is somewhere but i cant be bothered to look for it - fiore's original concept was called "gojo cat". as in satoru gojo. she had white hair, a hime cut, and sunglasses. honestly she hasnt really changed much apart from her outfit and the fact that shes a trans woman, i originally made her nonbinary but changed my mind. (u can see the boob growth from pic 1 to pic 2, estrogen is good to her. this is pre-BA because her boobs are still kinda small. half joking) if im being completely honest her hair is based on the porter robinson's hair in his cheerleader MV with the short brown hair, bangs, and red highlights. or at least, it was how i remembered it to look.

i started considering fiorebruary after finishing ethantember. it was initially a joke, but over time my obsession with fiore kept growing and eventually jan 31 hit and i was like yeah, i'm doing fiorebruary.

as a character i think shes very cool and awesome. i dont have the vocabulary nor eloquence i'd like to talk about her, i think her story is super cool and i enjoy the freedom theme very much. its both freedom in a positive way (hometown responsibilities and organized crime) and a negative way (her family is dead). its also a transgender allegory but shes already in the late stages of transitioning. and of course i have a huge crush on her. embarrassing!

i enjoyed this one a lot more than ethantember too, fiore has a bit more action in her life and a future story written so i got to draw a few more intense, not-so-slice-of-life scenes too. ethan is kind of just a guy nowadays, though this'll probably change as my girlfriend continues to write journalistgame. i liked adding in the pieces that show fiore's violent side (and covering her in blood)

i also think its pretty fucking cool shes a racing driver with lioness, tomato, and shark motifs. i love tomatoes. ive also begun to love her car a lot.

i've also been thinking a lot about fiorethan lately, i just really like their dynamic. it's a little basic, just a heated rivalry (dont talk to me about the show ive never watched it) with sexual tension that became a very close platonic relationship. theyve tried and a romantic relationship probably wouldnt work out (i disagree) but they still very much care about each other and arent scared of being intimate or fucking (though they probably wouldnt say it out loud). camille is cool with this & also joins in for the fucking and is close with fiore too. maybe camillefiorethan are poly LMAO.

i'm also very thankful for D4RKN55, a car girl who happened to come across my day 3 artwork. i honestly wasn't expecting anyone to enjoy the car references this much (and not like i knew how to make any deep ones)! i did have some motorsports mutuals but i didnt think this would hit anyone that hard, i'm really happy it did. this made my entire month and more! she stuck around for the rest of the art too and i'm so so thankful. i'm a little starstruck really, she said she used to own an e24 AND was looking forward to learning more about fiore. i dont think my art's ever touched someone like this before, and my god it's an amazing feeling. i hope she has a wonderful life.

three years of challenges

its kind of wild to think about how far ive come, ive NEVER finished a "draw something every day" art challenge until august august 2024. i'd do like three or four days of inktober, maybe like 2 days of mermay before giving up. hell, i even attempted august august in 2023 but i did a few days before they started piling up. been going strong since august august 2024 though. (i'm so glad im picking these challenges on months where im not busy at all. if i didn't cancel my con i wouldn't even be writing this blog post!)

it amazes me to see just how different each of the "waking up" prompts look from each other. august august -> ethantember was a 13 month difference while ethantember -> fiorebruary was 5 months. maybe not completely comparable though, fiorebruary was intentionally much higher effort than the first two. i probably spent double the time on a fiorebruary piece than an ethantember piece.

till next time

its been almost two days since the end of fiorebruary as i write this, i'm missing this more than ive ever missed the other two. tomato hot pot broth and endfield BGM will forever taste like fiorebruary. my month long situationship with fiore changed my life (yuck)

ive always been a fan of the journey over the destination, my favorite parts of story games (library of ruina and 13 sentinels come to mind) have always been the mid-game where youre still making your way through everything and learning new things. i'm glad i can finally rest, but as i'm writing it i find myself partially wishing i was in the middle of the challenge with weeks to go. a mutual put it very nicely: "fiorebruary ending is like finishing ur fave series and feeling the bittersweet feeling of it ending" [oheyitsmar.bsky.social].

i dont really have a plan for a next challenge. maybe ill do ethantember again. maybe ill do another fiorebruary next year. who knows? i usually do these on impulse anyway, so ill cross that bridge when i get there.

very sorry this is very rambly, ive probably repeated myself in multiple places. if you got to this point, thanks for reading! if you liked this or fiorebruary, i'd appreciate it if you left a comment on my guestbook!

it's also my birth month now i'm gonna do a bunch more commissions so i can treat myself to beautiful fiore art. please vote on the poll btw tell me your favorite fiorebruary day. if you want to vote multiple times just open an incognito tab or wait a day.

edit: i forgot to say: i encourage you to do something like this too! doesn't have to be this time consuming per day or grand, just small doodles every day or every other day works too. i kind of set my own rules for this challenge, so feel free to do what you want. if you want to improve your art while being really obsessed with a character a challenge like this does help a lot. if you're really you could do 100 days but even im not that strong yet.