Irasutoya Challenge

About

Irasutoya Challenge (Japanese: いらすとやチャレンジ) is a hashtag for an art challenge on X/Twitter where online artists post illustrations reinterpreting Irasutoya's plain and simple works by their drawing styles. In October 2024, many amateur and professional illustrators/mangakas joined this hashtag on the SNS.

Origin

According to a post on the Japanese social curation service Togetter published on October 19th, 2024^[1], Japanese professional illustrator and animator Hamafugu (はまふぐ) started this art trend on the 15th with his illustration post (shown below)^[2], in which he interpreted (解釈, Kaishau) Irasutoya's art of "Gal Peace" (ギャルピース)^[3], a kind of V-sign/peace sign pose becoming popular among young South Korean and Japanese women in 2022. This post earned over 17000 reposts and 230000 likes in its first week. The other Togetter post explains it also contributed to the original post's spread that the girl seemed to be wearing a men's blazer with buttons on the right, which gave rise to another interpretation that she might be wearing her boyfriend's.^[4] Expressing gratitude to a popular post pointing it out^[5], the author later admitted it was a simple mistake^[6] and responded with another illustration a few days later, in which she tried borrowing that blazer from "someone".^[7]

Spread

Following Hamafugu's idea, other online artists began posting their "Gal Peace" art with the hashtag "Irasutoya Challenge" (#いらすとやチャレンジ)^[8] (shown below). Along with the hashtag spread, its concept expanded because people also set Irassuya's other works as subjects. As a result, many illustrations reinterpreting Irasutoya's works flooded the SNS, enough to receive the Pixiv Encyclopedia article^[9] and media reports from online news media late that month.^[10][11]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References