DMA#37: How to Draw Diarrhea and Influence People (A Masterclass with Kyle Beaudette)

Thank you Beth Spencer, asher Perlman, Alex Hallatt, Margreet de Heer, chris eliopoulos, and many others for tuning into my live video and asking questions of my guest Kyle Beaudette! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I have a confession to make. I keep a secret folder on my computer. It’s not what you think, but it is deeply weird. It’s just labelled “Kyle,” and it is filled with screenshots of drawings by the Canadian artist Kyle Beaudette.

Whenever I’m feeling uninspired, creatively blocked, or just generally annoyed by the blank page, I open the Kyle folder. It is full of wobbly lines, strange creatures, and a frankly alarming amount of beautifully rendered bodily fluids.

Yesterday, I finally got to open the folder and talk to the man himself on Draw Me Anything. Kyle joined me from the frozen expanses of Canada (a fellow Commonwealth resident) for a conversation about the creative process, the horror of social media and AI Art, and how a tin of brown watercolour paint accidentally ruined his life.

Kyle is one of those infuriatingly talented people who didn’t even go to art school. He studied theater, and then spent a decade teaching himself how to sculpt by hanging out on an internet forum run by two brothers from Texas. For years, he was making these incredibly intricate, Tim Burton-esque sculptures. But the pivot to drawing happened in the most unexpected place: a middle school classroom.

As a substitute teacher, Kyle realised he needed a way to connect with the kids fast so he wouldn’t just be “the weird man that they don’t respect”. So, he sat down with a black pen and started drawing with them. He made a rule for himself: no pencils. He would only draw in pen, force himself to make mistakes, and then force himself to live with them. It was an exercise in embracing the mess, and it completely forged the “consistently wobbly” style he has today.

He achieves this signature wobble, by the way, by holding a tiny 01 Micron pen completely straight up and down while shaking his hand slightly. It’s a technique that his teachers tried to train out of him, which is exactly why it works so well.

But my absolute favourite story from the stream was the origin of his most popular subject matter: poop. A few years ago, Kyle’s mother bought him a beautiful Daniel Smith watercolour tin for Christmas. He opened it up and was horrified to find it was a landscape palette, absolutely loaded with different shades of brown. Thinking he had no use for them, he jokingly decided to use the browns to paint a gross picture of a turkey pooping.

People loved it. He did it again. Before he knew it, he was the internet’s premier artist of gastrointestinal distress. He also shared a pro-tip for the aspiring scatological artists out there: if you use Quinacridone Burnt Orange, it scans with a reddish tint, leading concerned followers to constantly advise him to see a gastroenterologist. This is the kind of high-level artistic insight you simply cannot get at RISD.

We also talked about the heartbreaking reality of having your brilliant, original ideas crushed by history. Kyle recently published a gorgeous book called The Garden Witch. Initially, he planned to build 50 sets and photograph his sculptures for it, like a lost stop-motion film. When that turned out to be a logistical nightmare, he asked the publisher if he could just do it in watercolour and ink instead. They said yes, and asked if he knew how to paint with watercolours. He lied, said yes, and immediately started frantically Googling videos of Quentin Blake.

He wanted to combine Blake’s loose, scratchy line work with the sheer narrative insanity of William Steig. He poured his heart and soul into the project. Then, a month before he finished, he discovered that Quentin Blake and William Steig had actually collaborated on a book together years ago. It’s called Wizzil, and it’s about a witch who looks exactly like his character, right down to the frizzy hair. He said he completely “died inside,” which is the only appropriate reaction to finding out two legends already casually dashed off your magnum opus decades ago.

While we talked, we drew. I whipped up an “amoeba unicorn” that slowly morphed into a bat because I accidentally gave it a pig nose. We also fielded a request from the chat to draw a pigeon getting chased by one of Kyle’s creatures, which naturally ended with the pigeon pooping itself.