How Beth Spencer Started an Art Movement with a Five-Minute Sketch
I need to tell you about —not because she asked me to (she didn't), but because watching her work on Substack these past few years has been like watching someone perfect the art of making strangers feel less alone with a pencil and a really good attitude about being terrible at things.
Beth runs the Introvert Drawing Club, which might be the most honest newsletter title in the history of newsletters. No grandiose promises about unlocking your creative genius in thirty days, no affiliate links to expensive art supplies that will supposedly transform your stick figures into Sistine Chapel material. Just: "Hey, you want to draw badly together? Great. Let's be bad at this thing we love."
I've been a subscriber since practically day one—her newsletter was among the first I ever signed up for when I stumbled into this Substack world with a dangerous amount of confidence in my own artistic abilities.
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What Beth does shouldn't work. In a world where everyone's selling courses and productivity hacks and systems for optimising your creative output, she's over there saying, "Actually, what if we just... drew some goats? What if we were gentle with ourselves? What if we got off our phones and made terrible art with dollar store supplies and loved every minute of it?"
The Badge That Broke the Internet
But here's the thing that makes Beth more than just another encouraging voice in the creative wilderness: she accidentally started a revolution with a five-minute sketch.
In June 2024, Beth Spencer picked up an iPad and sketched a red hand jotting the words "Created with human intelligence." She was procrastinating on her actual work—a children's book illustration—and had been seeing "a lot of concerned chatter about AI among fellow artists on Instagram." So she figured she'd post this little badge to her website to make it clear that everything there came from, you know, an actual human being.
"I thought maybe two or three people would say, 'Thanks, I'll take one,' because people love free stuff, right?" Instead, what happened was this: nearly 1,200 artists, illustrators and designers have contributed their own versions of her drawing to a growing gallery of unique images. The hashtag #hibadge2024 exploded across Instagram. Fast Company featured the movement, calling it exactly what it was: a small revolution.
Artists from the US, UK, Spain, Germany, Brazil, and Colombia started recreating Beth's scrappy little sketch in their own styles—watercolour, clay sculpture, minimalist doodles, bold hand lettering. Each one a tiny act of defiance against the algorithmic tide.
The Accidental Revolutionary
What makes this story so perfectly Beth Spencer is that she never set out to be the face of artistic resistance. "I didn't intend it as anti-tech, but as pro-human," she explained in a later interview. It wasn't about burning the machines—it was about celebrating the messy, imperfect, beautifully human process of making things with your hands.
"No software has lived life the way you have," she wrote, which might be the most succinct argument for human creativity I've ever heard. While AI churns through datasets looking for patterns, we're out here stubbing our toes and falling in love and watching our pets do ridiculous things and somehow turning all of that into art.
The badge caught fire because it crystallised something artists had been feeling but couldn't quite articulate: that there's value in the struggle, in the years of patient labour, in the way your hand shakes just slightly when you're drawing something that matters to you.
Why Beth Spencer Matters (Especially to Weirdos Like Us)
I started following Beth's work long before the badge went viral, back when she was just this thoughtful voice encouraging people to make bad drawings and be okay with it. What struck me wasn't just her art—though her loose, playful style has this wonderful "I'm having fun and you can too" energy—but her approach to the whole enterprise of being creative.
In her Zoom drawing sessions (yes, she runs fantastic live drawing sessions), people ask what supplies she's using, and half the time the answer is something from Dollar Tree. "My favourite things are these," she'll say, holding up a 75-cent brush pen that she swears works better than the fancy $11 ones.
This is revolutionary stuff, people. While the rest of us are bankrupting ourselves at art supply stores, convincing ourselves we need the right tools to make good art, Beth's over there making beautiful work with discount store markers and having an absolute blast doing it.
The Goat Whisperer
Beth has this thing with goats. (So do I.) It started after what she calls a "crushing career blow"—a book deal that fell through after she'd already told everyone about it. (Anyone who's had a creative project implode knows this particular circle of hell.) Instead of wallowing, she found a community garden in Memphis with goats and started drawing them.
"They're symbols of good in the world," she told me. And watching her capture these ridiculous, stubborn, oddly expressive creatures in her sketchbooks, you start to see what she means. There's something about the way goats exist in the world—unapologetically themselves, slightly chaotic, always ready to try climbing something they probably shouldn't—that feels like a metaphor for the creative life.
The goats led to other animals, which led to a broader philosophy about drawing from life instead of photos, about getting off your phone and actually looking at the world around you. It's David Sedaris's advice about living the "head-up life" translated into artistic practice.
The Introvert's Guide to Making Art
What I love most about Beth's approach is how it flies in the face of everything we're told about building a creative practice. No morning pages. No elaborate studio setups. No complex systems for tracking progress or measuring improvement.
Instead, it's: show up, make marks, be kind to yourself about the results. Draw the goat even if the goat looks like a potato with legs. Use the cheap markers. Take breaks to watch your cat knock over the paint water. Post the terrible stuff alongside the good stuff because the terrible stuff teaches you something, too.
Her drawing challenges aren't about competition—they're about community. People sharing their wobbly self-portraits and their wrong-colored flowers and their attempts at human hands (the Everest of artistic endeavours, as any cartoonist will tell you). Each submission is a tiny victory against the voice that says you're not good enough, not qualified enough, not artist enough to make things.
The Bigger Picture
The "Created with Human Intelligence" badge became a phenomenon because it gave artists something they desperately needed: a way to claim their space in an increasingly algorithmized world. But Beth's real contribution goes deeper than any single viral moment:
She's created a corner of the internet where it's safe to be a beginner, where process matters more than product, where the goal isn't perfection but connection. Her Substack feels like having a conversation with that friend who somehow makes you feel better about everything just by being themselves. In a time when everyone's trying to scale and optimise and hustle their creativity into submission, Beth's out there saying, "What if we just drew some animals and felt good about it?"
And somehow, that quiet revolution—one terrible drawing at a time—might be exactly what we need.
If this made you want to pick up a pencil (even a Dollar Tree one), that's Beth Spencer's magic working exactly as intended. Check out Beth's work at Introvert Drawing Club and follow her drawing adventures @bethspencerart. Fair warning: you will end up buying art supplies you don't need and feeling optimistic about your artistic abilities. Consider yourself warned.
Forward this to that friend who still thinks they "can't draw." Everyone can draw badly, and that's the point.
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