A big-banner production house reached out to Anushka Bansal, a student of fine arts in Kanpur, via Instagram recently. On offer was a project to design a poster for its upcoming movie. Bansal, 22, didn’t know anyone in the Hindi film industry until then. The opportunity came her way when she made a shift from fine art to fan art during the lockdown.
With college shut for this period, she got the time to pursue drawing as a hobby and soon started dabbling in fan art, loosely defined as artwork voluntarily created by a fan of a celebrity or a fictional character.
“I saw that many people were gaining popularity on Instagram on the back of fan art, but it was all reproduction of celeb images in some form or the other. I decided to do caricatures, as it required a bit of imagination and set my art apart,” she says.
Noticing her work, a Hindi film actor asked their manager to get in touch with Bansal after being tagged on her Instagram post.
“If I had applied to any of the big content companies directly, I had a slim chance of getting noticed,” she said.
Bansal is among a new breed of amateur artists who have taken to social media during the lockdown and after, to share artwork they have been doing in their free time.
In a bid to get instant traction, many of these artists — most in their early 20s and living in tier 2, 3 cities — are creating fan art of celebrities and social media influencers, hoping to tap into their massive fanbase by tagging the pop culture icons along with their fandom accounts.
Many artists have, in the process, seen significant growth in followers in addition to bagging dozens of work projects, either directly through the celebrity or via users who spotted their fan art.
The trend has received a shot in the arm from celebrities with millions of Instagram followers — like Virat Kohli, Deepika Padukone, Ayushmann Khurrana, Aditi Rao Hydari, and Danish Sait — who are now reposting fan art dedicated to them via Instagram Stories, while giving due credit to the artists.
In May, actor Deepika Padukone — with over 52 million Instagram followers — started sharing her fans’ artwork, including her portrait sketches, paintings, and animated illustrations, as part of an ongoing trend called #FanArtFriday.
“If their work is seen and appreciated and it helps artists, then I’m even more encouraged to share it on my feed,” says actor Aditi Rao Hydari, who regularly posts #FanArtFriday stories for over 5 million followers on her Instagram account. “This is my way of giving back to some incredibly talented artists,” she adds.
Like their Bollywood counterparts, young actors in South Indian filmdom, like Keerthy Suresh and Anupama Parameswaran, also include fan art as part of their Instagram Story highlights.
In Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, 23-year-old Sowmya Pisupati got motivated to joined a digital drawing course to get better at this game after Keerthy Suresh shared her pencil sketch fan art.
The sudden outpouring of acknowledgement is also connected to the lockdown which gave many celebs more time to interact with fans on social media with several shoots stalled in the initial days, according to celebrity management consultants.
According to Facebook’s ad vertical — Facebook.com/Ads — there are approximately 700,000 users on Instagram in India who have expressed an interest in or liked pages related to fan art.
They represent 5% of the global Instagram user base interested in the practice. Additionally, there are over 32 million posts on Instagram using the hashtag #FanArt.
Fan art is an established internet culture in the US, Japan and South Korea, largely driven by comic book superheroes, animation films, and K-pop icons, respectively.
Evolution of Fan Art Subculture
To be sure, fan art has always existed offline even though artists remained faceless in that realm.
In early 2000, fan art manifested itself online in a big way on DeviantArt, referred to as the “first large-scale online art community” by popular art-focused publication artsy.net.
“Social media truly erased the boundary between the art and the artist with respect to fan art, says anthropologist Ishtaarth Dalmia, who works as AVP of strategy at digital agency Dentsu Webchutney.
To think that brands pay crores to get celebrities to endorse their products…these artists are, in a way, getting free endorsement from celebrities, notes Keerat Grewal, partner at Ormax Media, a consulting firm that tracks films, TV and OTT platforms.
Joyal Varughese John, 21, says Virat Kohli endorsing his fan art on Instagram this April was the “happiest day” of his life. The graphic design student hails from Pathanamthitta district in Kerala.
For content creators, fan art also becomes a metric to determine their relevance in pop culture. Lockdown breakthrough star Danish Sait has had several fans regularly create fan art on his various fictional, but familiar, avatars from this period.
Standup comedian Supriya Joshi (@supaarwoman) refers to her fan art Story highlight on Instagram as “Fam Art”. “I feel it would be disrespectful to call someone who takes time out of their day to make art about me as anything lesser than family,” she says.
Some fan artists have a fanbase of their own.
In May, Mumbai-based artist, Swapnil Pawar, posted actor Ranveer Singh’s portrait reimagined as Vincent Van Gogh. The actor shared the picture without credit at first and then reposted it on Instagram with due credits after user backlash, says Pawar, 40, who runs an animation company.
Commercial (Fan) Art
Historically, fan art has always been about the muse.
Online, however, the practice, and not necessarily the person, is emerging as the focus of late, says Rishi Kakar, chief marketing and strategy officer at Kokuyu Camlin, an art and stationery products maker that has organised fan art contests on social media in the past.
Brands like Adobe that provide software for digital drawing have also initiated fan art contests from time to time.
The trend has been monetised by brands and individuals alike.
Punith KK, 26, rose from 250 to 8,000 followers on Instagram over the last few months after his fan art posts were shared by South Indian actors like Tovino Thomas and Anusree. “I now get 10-20 work enquiries a day and charge between Rs 1,500 and Rs 7,000 per project,” says the civil engineer from Thrissur in Kerala.
However, instances of commercial success are few and far between, says Bansal from Kanpur. “Most users haggle on price as they don’t quite understand how much time and effort goes into ideating and then creating an artwork,” she adds. Then there’s the issue of fan art getting plagiarised for merchandise without giving royalty to the artists. Given the nature of the trend, individual posts get several likes at once even as the artist’s follower count grows only marginally.
Fan art also attracts criticism for ethical issues.
This is especially so in instances “where the artist takes the liberty to interpret or sexualise a celebrity’s image in a manner that may seem objectionable to the very subject of the artwork,” says Malathi Jogi, a Mumbai-based designer who regularly posts her art on Instagram.
“A section of artists see it as a lesser form of art for its lack of original concept,” adds Jogi.
A lot of people are also accused of creating fan art without necessarily being a fan just to increase their social clout. It’s quite prominent, for instance, with fan art dedicated to BTS, a Korean pop band that is also a global sensation now. “Even if it’s not spectacular artwork, people know it’ll get a lot of traction because of an extremely supportive fan community.”
In that sense, fan art is also fast-becoming an exercise in moment marketing, a digital advertising strategy where brands rush in to hijack pop culture developments to simply catch attention.
For Pawar in Mumbai, who made “zero income” from his fan art, that little attention is precious still.
“I spent 20 years in the animation industry and nobody knew my name. Thanks to fan art, even I have a mention on the internet now,” he says.
(Illustration and graphics by Rahul Awasthi)
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