As a community manager by day and illustrator by night I could spend hours listing the benefits social networks – in particular Twitter – have for creatives. As an illustrator, it’s perfect for meeting fellow artists, self-promotion, finding out about exhibitions and searching out new clients. This should be obvious: Social networks are great for, er, networking. But by uniting different imaginations – often not just artists – social networks have become a surprising springboard for some of the strangest, funniest and most downright brilliant art around.
In 1999 Sam Brown (the pseudonym of artist Adam Culbert) founded Exploding Dog. This website invites users to email or tweet in captions, which Brown then turns into cartoon form, all set in a stickman world (with added robots and dogs). 14 years on, he’s still expanding this colourful universe, visually answering the big questions and showing us just what it would look like if 2 chicks were having an existential crisis. It’s a simple idea but a great way of engaging an audience, enabling users to be part of the creative process rather than just passive observers.
Ever wondered what Oprah Winfrey looks like being force-fed Spandau Ballet tapes by William Shatner? No, me either but now I know thanks to which has been clogging up my Facebook newsfeed for the last few weeks (be warned, it’s not always SFW). The concept is similar to Exploding Dog – users send in random and humorous captions and Jim will naively recreate them using trusty ol’ Microsoft Paint. Di Vinci it ain’t but it’s bizarre, nostalgic and, above all, hilarious.
Illustration agency Handsome Frank embraced their Twitter following with their ‘Tweet a Brief‘ competition asking the community to (guess what?) tweet a brief for their artists to fulfil. It resulted in some weird and wonderful work and an exhibition showcasing it all (one meta brief was entitled 140 characters which featured Where’s Wally, Mary Poppins and the Ghost Busters, amongst others).
On the less surreal side, creator of lovely comic goodness Lucy Knisley went to Twitter to crowd-source content for one of her autobiographical comics, Stop Paying Attention. She invited followers to submit their fears and photos for the chance to appear in her comic. It’s a great trade off; the artist gets some original and genuine ideas and the user gets the chance to be immortalised as lovely a watercolour version of themselves. I’ve seen a similar tactic on Kickstarter – throw enough money at a comic project you can be shrunk into a panel and star in a crowd scene.
The Tweet Museum came and went in 2010 but Hello Giggles continues the simple yet effective idea of pictorially commemorating Tweets. The fleeting lifespan of a tweet is great: you read something once and unless you interact with it, it disappears into the ether pretty swiftly. Even the most succinct, pithy quip won’t usually hang around for long before making way for something pithier and quippier. Drawing a fleeting remark and making it ‘more permanent’ is a lovely idea, a graveyard for tweets of olde. A statement, a thought, a feeling that was once restricted by 140 characters expands into something that represents 1000 words.
Freya is a Community Manager, an illustrator and a lover of 80s music (particularly The Smiths). In between drinking shed-loads of tea, she supports clients such as the BBC, Diageo and ACCA.
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