A Collection of Artisanal Memes
November 1, 2016 8:34 AM   Subscribe

A Collection of Artisanal Memes
A Facebook photo gallery of painstakingly hand drawn (on Android phone) internet cartoons I'm calling "artisanal memes." I produced these two dozen original illustrations working like a demon over a roughly one week stretch of time. [Alternate link: DeviantArt]

I've been under a lot of heavy life stress lately and when I'm under life stress, I have a sort of nervous habit of losing myself in intricate creative projects as a self-soothing, coping mechanism. It seems to be related to my particular form of ADD, because to be honest, once a project catches my interest, the work becomes almost compulsive for me and it can be hard to disengage my focus.

Recently, during an especially painful and stressful week when my kids were away in their mother's custody and I was struggling to manage my depression alone, I rediscovered the therapeutic benefits of sketching and almost by accident started making these single panel internet cartoons I like to call "artisanal memes." Satirizing more conventional memes and internet culture generally, but made using painstaking manual work rather than being programmatically generated, "artisanal memes" are partly my own personal response to what I see as some of the more dehumanizing trends and tendencies in contemporary internet culture.

In about a week's time, I ended up producing about two dozen of these artisanal memes, all of which I've now collected into a Facebook photo gallery.

Some of them are silly, some serious, some just plain weird. I made them all on my Samsung phone using the Autodesk Sketchbook app for Android. With only two minor exceptions (see if you can spot them!), all images used were drawn by hand without a stylus on my phone.

In any case, I hope some of these make you smile.
Role: illustrator cartoonist writer
posted by saulgoodman (8 comments total)

Could you make it publicly accessible?
posted by amtho at 9:02 AM on November 1, 2016


It should be already, unless I'm Facebook incompetent (which is possible)... I'll double check the privacy settings. Hopefully Facebook allows that. I just assumed their photo galleries would be accessible of the privacy was set to public. If not, I might have to redo this with some other host...
posted by saulgoodman at 9:17 AM on November 1, 2016


If the main fpp link isn't accessible outside Facebook, try this one instead. It seems to work for me through a browser whether I'm logged into Facebook or not. Though FB does present external users with some annoying nags to sign up for an account, I don't think sign up is required to view the gallery...
posted by saulgoodman at 9:26 AM on November 1, 2016


Sorry, both links are presenting only a prompt to log in.

It is awesome that you did this, though, by the way.
posted by amtho at 11:34 AM on November 1, 2016


Okay, I'm going to set up a gallery on DeviantArt. Maybe I'll ask the mods for a redo/edit to the post once I get that set up. Thanks for the heads up.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:10 PM on November 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Okay, I've also set up the gallery over here on Deviant Art and have asked the mods to add the link and some explanatory language...
posted by saulgoodman at 9:23 PM on November 1, 2016


[Added DeviantArt link to post.]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 6:56 AM on November 2, 2016


Thanks for adding the alternative link. Could not view otherwise. These are really good.
posted by AugustWest at 11:08 AM on November 2, 2016


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