Drawfee Generator

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 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.

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.