Drawfee Generator

Website

Sometimes when I’m working, I’ll pull up a YouTube video to listen to in the background. It’s usually something that doesn’t require a great deal of direct attention, since my focus is on whatever project I’m engaged with. A favorite of mine has been Drawfee.

For those unfamiliar, Drawfee is a channel focused on a group of artists who take viewer-submitted prompts and draw them. The results are often pretty good, but the banter of the artists is really what makes the show worth watching.

I had one of their videos on, and the particular set of prompts had me thinking that it might be fun to draw something reactively myself. So I looked around for an existing prompt generator, before doing the most programmer thing possible…

# An hour and a half later…

I decided it would be more fun to create one that mimicked the type of prompts that the Drawfee artists often receive.

The first version of the Drawfee Generator.
The first version of the Drawfee Generator.

The generator just picks a random adjective (sequence), noun, and verb from a list and then displays them on the screen after a small roulette-style animation. The whole thing took about an hour and a half to put together, largely just spent trying to come up with parts of the prompt.

The original Twitter post. I don't have Twitter account anymore.
The original Twitter post. I don’t have Twitter account anymore.

After I finished the website, I made a post on Twitter and tagged @DrawfeeShow. I thought that I might get a few likes and maybe even a response from one of the Drawfee arists. The actual response was a bit more than that.

# There was a warm response on Twitter

The Drawfee community had a field day with the generator. It was honestly really cool to see so many people using the generator and sharing their creations.

I also got responses from the Drawfee artists themselves!

# Drawfee gave it a try

A few weeks later, a new Drawfee video was released, and to my surprise, they used the generator in the video!

This was personally really exciting, as I think it was the first non-work related project that had people directly interacting with it. I no longer have the analytics for the site, but it managed to maintain a steady stream of around 12k users a day for a few weeks after the video was released.

# A second video warrants an update

Over a year later, I was doing some work and watching the latest Drawfee video. To my surprise, they used the generator yet again.

I had all but forgotten about the site at this point and, after seeing the second video, I decided to make a few updates to the generator. Most notablly, I reworked the design to mimic how Drawfee presents their prompts in their videos. I also reworked the algorithm and created a more complex system that allows for a greater variety of prompts.

The second version of the Drawfee Generator.
The second version of the Drawfee Generator.