I Created An Account Where Professional Artists Recreate Children’s Monster Drawings Each Week (35 New Pics)

I am a full-time professional illustrator who has created 45 picture books for children. In 2016, I wrote a book called “Monsters Go Night-Night” in which all the character designs were based on monster drawings my 5-year-old son Elijah had made. To celebrate the book’s release, I invited artists to redraw those same 7 original kid drawings in their own styles and post to social media. The response was so astounding that I dubbed the challenge “Monsters Go” and for the next three years continued to share a new monster prompt each week, now provided by all six of my children. During these years, I launched another personal project, which I continued to refer to as “Monsters Go.” In this iteration, rather than many artists drawing from a single monster prompt, instead I as a single artist would redraw many monsters submitted by many kids.

More info: Instagram

I received an overwhelming 20,000 designs submitted by kids, and redrew 300 of them from 2017-2018. In 2019, I wound down the online challenge for artists to redraw my own kids’ monsters. But when the pandemic hit, I began receiving regular requests from artists asking for its return, folks who were looking for both joy and creative inspiration in difficult times.

So in late 2020, the Monsters Go Instagram account jumped back to life with weekly prompts and highlighted responses. I was running low on my own kids’ monster drawings to use as prompts, so I began pulling from the 20,000 drawings that I had received from my other project. Since 2016, over 1,000 artists have played along, and around 4,000 pieces of artwork have been created from these prompts.

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