Drawfee and Creativity

I started this blog to talk about anime, and that’s mostly what I’ve done. But I’ve also talked about movies, books, Western comics, music, Western animation, and other random stuff. And today, for the first time, I’m going to talk about a YouTube show.

I discovered Drawfee about six months ago during a bit of a low point in my life. I was just starting to realize that I went into a line of work that actively discourages any sort of creativity. That was an unpleasant surprise, since I chose my line of work because I thought it would have some scope for creativity.

Drawfee is a show where a group of artists make improvised drawings. Usually it’s something pop culture-related, like drawing Link in different art styles or drawing obscure Marvel comics characters based on just the name. They’ll also do weirder things like drawing bad sky animals or whale wizards or “phrase people” like Debbie Downer. They’ve also done drawing-based role playing campaigns and a live variety show where they did strange challenges like making a man out of various canned meat products.

I enjoy YouTube shows where the group feels like a bunch of friends hanging out and having a good time, and Drawfee nails this. The hosts are delightful. Nathan, the leader and original Drawfee, is sweet and gentle and loves Pokemon and puns. Jacob is funny, witty, and “contains multitudes” as he is wont to say. Julia is an insanely talented artist whose favorite subjects include classic men’s fashions and horror monsters. Karina, the fourth Drawfee, is a huge weeb who loves Digimon and Yugioh. I could go on forever about how much I like each of them and how well they mesh to make the show more fun, hilarious, warm, and inviting than any other YouTube show I’ve watched.

The first episode I ever saw was the Hollow Knight episode. I was playing the game at the time and looking up a lot of boss guides since I’d never played a game that difficult before. The Hollow Knight Drawfee episode showed up in my YouTube recommendations, and I checked it out and enjoyed it. A while later, I caught a couple of the Marvel episodes, and I was hooked. The humor was just my thing. Over time I came to appreciate the show more and more. I got to know the hosts. I got to know the running jokes. I got to know the guests and the format. I learned a lot about what it’s like to be a working artist, which was interesting, since I had wanted to be an artist when I was younger. The show slowly became a presence in my life. The worse things got, the more I seemed to enjoy it. I was having an especially bad time in my life when Variety Hour was running, but every Thursday I’d come home and have a beer and watch Variety Hour, and it always helped, at least for a few hours. Other fans of the show with problems much worse than mine have said the same.

I watch Screen Junkies routinely, especially Screen Junkies Universe, and I enjoy them a lot too. They’re also very funny and their shows have the same feeling of a group of friends chatting. And they’ve done a lot to change the mood of their channel to something more inviting and friendly, and mostly succeeded. But there’s something different and special about Drawfee for me. Drawfee is warmer and friendlier by far than Screen Junkies, and it achieves it so naturally. The show’s format lends itself to it; there’s no competition, no argument, no disagreement, just people drawing and having fun. Nathan is extremely warm and friendly by nature, and he brings out those qualities in everyone else. Everyone trades compliments freely and spends a lot of time talking about anime and video games they like and cool art things they admire.

But the warmth isn’t the main draw for me, I think. I think what really appeals to me so much about Drawfee is the raw creativity. While a lot of the episodes involve pop culture somehow, they’re almost never straight up drawings of existing characters. Episodes often turn into the weirdest brainstorming sessions. Everyone discusses the elements of the art style of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, or speculates how a skeleton would smoke a cigarette, or they just pun and free associate until an idea comes to whoever’s drawing. They fuss and futz with the drawing, trying different things until something works. Sometimes they’re not happy with the result. Sometimes they unexpectedly make something great.

I love watching this creative process, and all the weird things that come out of it. It fascinates me and it makes me laugh. I brought up Screen Junkies earlier because I used to also love one of their shows, Movie Fights, in the same way I love Drawfee. Movie Fights was a show where three competitors would debate questions about movies. Unlike Drawfee, it was a competition with a scoring system, a winner, and championships, but that wasn’t why I enjoyed it. My favorite part of Movie Fights was the pitch questions, where the three competitors would get a prompt, like “Pitch a movie based on an app” or “Add a scene where a man plays a saxophone in the rain to a movie”. I got the same kind of charge out of seeing where people’s minds went with the prompt, how they brought together their knowledge of movies, their taste and aesthetic, their senses of humor, and the parameters of the prompt into a pitch. But Drawfee is even better for this than Movie Fights. It’s like a Movie Fights made up of all pitch questions where you get to look at cool drawings at the end. And without the trappings of a competition, the Drawfees can work together and combine their powers to make something even better, even weirder, even funnier, even cooler.

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Drawfee was owned by CollegeHumor, one of the longest-lived internet content companies around. CollegeHumor in turn was owned by IAC, a huge holding company that also owns a bunch of other web properties like Match.com, The Daily Beast, and Angie’s List. In January of 2020, IAC, the holding company that owned CollegeHumor, decided to shut them down. CollegeHumor’s Chief Creative Officer bought the company, but he couldn’t afford to keep all the staff on board, so almost all of them were laid off, including all the Drawfees.

Drawfee is in a weird spot right now. They’re trying to work out a deal to give the four hosts rights to the show so they can keep doing it on their own, probably supported by Patreon and other means that smaller independent creators use to get paid for their work. They’re still producing videos so YouTube doesn’t mark the channel as inactive and stop recommending its videos. But they’ve been in limbo now for almost two months. Even when they get the rights and are able to continue, they probably won’t be able to support four hosts and an editor on a single Patreon, so Drawfee will no longer be everyone’s full-time job. They won’t be able to build fancy sets on a single Patreon, so big projects like Variety Hour probably won’t happen anymore. But for me, the core of the show is Nathan, Jacob, Julia, and Karina enjoying a friendly brainstorming session on something weird and fun. All they need for that is their classic format, everyone talking over a screen recording of a Wacom tablet on which someone is drawing. And the episodes they’ve been making while in exile are top quality. So I hope the show continues for many years yet, and I’ll certainly be donating to the Patreon when it appears.