About

"I Have Drawn You" is a catchphrase expression typically used to highlight crudely drawn portraits of celebrities and fictional characters. The meme is often iterated as a series of multi-pane image macros illustrating a conversation between two notable actors or fictional characters.

Origin

On May 20th, 2011, the earliest known instance of the multi-pane comic strip was featured on the Tumblr humor blog The Sochill Network,^[1] though the watermark indicates that it had been previously submitted to 9gag.

The Format

1. "Hey [character's name]…"
2. "What?"
3. "I have drawn you." – A crude fan-drawn sketch of the character replaces the original photo)
4. "Oh, cool bro!" (the original photo is morphed with the drawing creating a humorous image)

Spread

Throughout 2011 and 2012, the Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort comic strip was featured on several internet humor sites, including 9GAG^[6], Cheezburger^[4], FunnyJunk^[2], WeKnowMemes^[8], ISeeAHappyFace^[3] and MemeCenter^[10], as well as on Tumblr^[8], Twitter^[9] and Reddit.^[5] On March 10th, 2014, BuzzFeed UK writer Jamie Jones tweeted an image compilation of celebrity photos that have been photoshopped to reflect their poorly drawn fan art illustrations (shown below), garnering over 8,000 retweets and 7,700 favorites. That same day, Redditor Adamic6 re-submitted Jamie Jones' photoshopped compilation to /r/funny, where it accrued over 2,697 points and subsequently reached the front page.

/r/BadlyDrawnCelebrities

Following the viral take off of Jones' image on /r/funny, Redditor llamas1355 promptly followed up with the creation of /r/badlydrawncelebrities^[13], a subreddit dedicated to curating poorly drawn fan art illustrations of celebrities and their corresponding photoshopped parodies. As of May 2016, the subreddit has 1,400 subscribed readers.

Badly Drawn Celebrities

On April 1st, 2015, Etsy artist @Sean launched an Instagram account^[14] and an Etsy store^[15] to showcase and sell his original pencil drawings of celebrities that are poorly drawn on intention. As of May 2016, the artist has sold 1,787 copies of his artworks via Etsy and garnered 7,000 followers on Instagram.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References