When Valve announced the three categories for the second Call to Arms-ory, Fairy Tales looked like the safe bet. Everyone knows the stories, the reference material is endless, and nobody has to invent anything from scratch. The first wave of submissions bore that out: we went through it a month ago, and almost everything leaned on the obvious, a race to see who could draw Red Riding Hood and the wolf first.
A month on, the theme has grown up. The easy ideas are taken, so artists have pushed further. Submissions are now turning up where the story isn’t just painted on the body but built into how the skin works. On one of them, the pattern decides which character you end up with, so the hunt isn’t for the right float or the right seed, it’s for your favourite.
We went back to the Workshop and rebuilt the list from scratch.
⚡️ Here are ten new pieces with a real idea behind the artwork!




