“You’re really tapping into that whole ‘sex sells’ thing,” my wife told me – not entirely sarcastically – when I showed her the first proper video I’d posted on my new YouTube channel.
To be fair, the title was “Filthy Animal Crossing” (I got a kick out of the throwback Home Alone reference). But she was right. It’s probably a questionable way to get a channel off the ground. When you only have a couple videos up on your entire channel, any one video is going to be seen as a mission statement of sorts.
But I couldn’t help myself. The conversation I’d had with Sacramento-based artist and toy designer Candie Bolton on my podcast about her virtual graffiti tagging – drawing naughty pictures of Animal Crossing characters in string bikinis – captivated me in a way I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t merely a cynical “hurrr… look at Isabelle flashing underboob” attempt at baiting a few clicks. There was something meaningful in what Candie was doing.
It’s a story about virtual community and virtual art collecting and finding ways to make our friends laugh during stretches of forced separation and stressful uncertainty.
It’s a story about an artist picking up the china vase of her audience’s expectations and smashing it to bits on the floor. Simply because the work was so outlandish it made her smile.
It’s a story about making art for art’s sake. Having the courage to shove terms like highbrow and lowbrow through the airlock and jettison them into outer space.
It’s a story about curiosity and being willing to be distracted by a shiny object glimmering in the periphery of your vision, which just might be a will-o’-the-wisp that wants to lead you somewhere special. After all, that creature from English folklore that appears in dark woods and gives travellers a beacon to follow, is a metaphor for hope, direction, inspiration. The inner compass suddenly, mystically externalised.
It’s a story about artistic mastery and self-handicapping as a means to better flaunt one’s prowess. The art of the virtuoso performance artist. Houdini not being content to merely escape from a straitjacket but adding chains and being forced to do it underwater with oxygen running out.
Candie’s Animal Crossing art delights us because we know she’s the illustrator version of a juggler who’s just swapped out her bowling pins for growling chainsaws. And learning how to pull off this new feat with the audience watching her figure it out in real time. That willingness to throw oneself into a challenge, to finger-shush the voice of self-judgment and enjoy the learning process, what an inspirational example for the rest of us.
It’s a story about the comedic arts – the power of surprise and juxtaposition. The intimacy and bonding power of humour, of crassness. The odd reassurance many of us feel in the company of transgressive art. That we can explore the most primal aspects of our humanity – sex being one of the most central, closely followed by death, which is just the other side of the yin-yang of the cycle of life and death I suppose.
It’s a story about the way that artistic vandalism, because of how unassuming it is, can be the jester at the feast who says profound things about the world, even talks shit about the monarch, but can get away with it because the whole thing is just a bit of fun. Is it really? To paraphrase what a wise man once sang, the words of the prophets are spray-painted on the subway walls. The trickster, the truth-teller.
Well… shit. Maybe “Filthy Animal Crossing” really is my channel’s mission statement.
Here’s the transcript of my conversation with Candie about the Animal Crossing prank.
JASON: So how did this whole thing get started?
CANDIE: I guess we should start explaining what Animal Crossing is. It’s a game on the Nintendo Switch. And it’s a very wholesome, kid-friendly game. You have an island. There’s cute little animal villagers who live with you. You basically collect items, make your island look beautiful and you can play with other players who have their own island and you trade items and interact with them and visit each other’s islands.
So I got super into this game and the past two weeks I’ve been playing a lot with Luke Chueh and also Scott Tolleson and Patrick from Munky King. We joke that we’re the west coast toy crew and we’re all playing Animal Crossing together. And we have a group chat where we’re talking about all the items and different things happening on our islands, and all that.
So in this game you can also write on each other’s bulletin board that’s located on their islands. And I didn’t even know that you could write or draw on this bulletin board. I saw posts somewhere that sounds like, by the way, you can draw on here.
JK: That sounds dangerous.
CB: Oh yeah. Especially because it’s meant to be a kid-friendly game. I think it’s rated ‘E for Everyone’ or something. But it was really interesting to me. I just wanted to give it a try. I was on my friend’s island and I just wanted to make something that was really funny that would make her laugh. So I think I just drew a really giant ass and I wrote “THICC” and there’s this girl’s ass with a thong. And it was a really crude drawing. It wasn’t very good but it was good enough. I showed it to her and it made her laugh. I showed it to my boyfriend and he thought it was hilarious. I just thought, this is really funny and unexpected because the last thing you expect when you look at someone’s bulletin board in this game is something inappropriate.
JK: Yeah, you expect that in a subway or a metro stop, or something like that. But definitely not in Cartoon Happy Fun Land Family-Friendly Nintendo World.
CB: I just thought it was funny and I wanted to keep trying to get better at it. Because the other aspect of it is that it’s incredibly hard to draw on this thing. So the Nintendo Switch has a touch screen but it is not as good as your phone or a tablet. Definitely not as easy to use as an Apple Pencil on the tablet, which basically feels like real drawing. I’d say that the bulletin board is between those pads that you write your signature on when you’re checking out, it’s between that and an Etch-A-Sketch. It’s very difficult.
I’m using my finger so the whole time that I’m touching the pad, I can’t see what I’m drawing because my finger is covering it up. So when I’m drawing, I feel like I’m just hoping the lines get placed in the correct position. And if it’s not then I have to erase or redo the line over and over. So it’s really hard to work with. And you’re limited with how many lines you can do. If you want to fill up the whole page with ink, you can’t do that because you run out of ink. There’s a gauge on the right side of the screen and as you’re drawing it’s slowly depleting.
There’s only four colours – black, yellow, pink and blue. And there are three line thicknesses. So it’s really not intended for anyone to do any kind of masterpiece on here. But because you’re so limited, that’s kind of what I found fun about it. Because then it’s like, let’s see what I can do with these very limited tools.
JK: Those constraints always make the end result more interesting if it was very effortless and seamless to work with.
CB: When you have unlimited possibilities it’s easy to overthink it, you’re like, I can do anything. But on this medium you can’t do anything that you want. It’s super limited by even just how many lines you can draw on there. So that’s what I found appealing about it.
JK: Because the drawings are sexy, have you had any issues with them getting reported or removed by Nintendo?
CB: I haven’t been made aware of it if it has. I think that when you look at someone’s bulletin board, you have the option to report something. So I think if someone reports it then it might be looked at and they might have to evaluate that.
I should maybe explain what I’ve been drawing since my first drawing. After I drew my first drawing of the ass I started drawing actual girls. Mostly girls wearing bikinis so there’s no nudity. I haven’t drawn anyone that’s naked.
JK: It only looks nude in the process videos before you add the clothes.
CB: That’s true. That’s just part of the art process though. When you’re drawing a person, you start drawing their general form and then you add clothes to them, right?
JK: Yeah, it’s a figure-drawing exercise before it transitions into Barbie dress-up.
CB: Yeah, but I can see how it is totally unexpected. Not only because it’s in basically a kid’s game but also because I don’t really draw this kind of thing. I’ve always been really into anime and video games. And if you play Japanese JRPGs and if you watch a lot of anime, this is what the girls look like in this genre of stuff. So I’ve always been a fan of this art style. I just never really did it too much. I used to draw more in this style when I was a teenager but since I’ve been starting my art career, I was like, I need to take it seriously! I need to do serious stuff! So I’ve been doing Japanese creatures. It’s been a lot of dragons lately.
I just wanted to not take it so seriously. I wanted to do something fun, something that I thought was funny. I hope people see that there’s a sense of humour in it. I don’t want anyone to take it seriously. And I’m sorry if I’ve offended anyone. Because when I posted the time-lapse videos of my drawings of these girls in bikinis, I lost a lot of followers from that. So, yeah, I think I did offend people. But, yeah, you can’t make everyone happy!
The characters I’m drawing look like animal characters from the game. So I just think it’s really funny. The character in Animal Crossing turned into some sexy character.
JK: Then you opened it up for commissions?
CB: It happened really quickly. I just started doing these drawings. I think it was just last week. At first it was really hard to just draw anything in general. And within just two days, I was like, I’ve kind of got the hang of things, now I feel like I can draw whatever I want on there, practically. At first people were messaging me, seeing on my Instagram Stories that I was posting my artwork there. And I was getting a ton of DMs from people saying, please come to my town and draw on my bulletin board! I think in the first two days of me starting to do it, oh gosh, I got way too many DMs about it. I was travelling from town to town. I made over two million bells doing this. And before that I was poor. I was lucky when I had 10,000 bells at any given time.
JK: Was it always in-game currency or did you toy with the idea of making a bit of side-hustle money with it?
CB: Well, I did this for two days where it was only getting tips in the game currency. And that was fine and I had fun with it. But they were taking up a lot of my time because some of these drawings, I was spending maybe 15-20 minutes. But yeah sometimes I’d hang around at their island. I’d want to check things out or they’d want to talk. And then it would end up taking half an hour. I’m actually working on a lot of projects right now. I should not be spending any time in Animal Crossing at this moment. That’s how bad it is. I am super behind. But I kept doing this because it was just a fun distraction. It kept me motivated I guess to keep going. And it’s just such a fun, really quick, stupid drawing. And then I post it on my Instagram and then I go on to the next island.
But like I said, I was playing this game with Luke Chueh and Scott Tolleson. They're both artists and they were like, we see you spending a lot of time on these drawings and you do a really great job on them. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to start asking for real money. So after two or three days I decided, I’m getting way too many commissions, I can’t keep up with them and I have real work I need to be doing so I’m just going to ask for five dollars in real currency and then also ask that they tip me with in-game currency. As soon as I started that, I got way less DMs about it. But I’m also like, that’s fine because it was taking up way too much of my time.
I needed to slow it down anyway.
JK: Is there any element to this whole side adventure in terms of resetting or having a brain injury, waking up and needing to learn how to be an artist again? How much did that factor into it? Becoming a beginner again at this thing that you’ve spent so many years refining.
CB: I think that might have been what really encouraged me to keep going. Because when I first started, I could barely draw anything on the bulletin board. And then I saw so much progress in just two or three days. And that alone is what was the most exciting part of this whole thing for me.
Just seeing that I could take this really crude drawing tool that’s not meant to be for drawing anything besides just some smiley faces or something and seeing what I could do with it. That was the funnest part about it to me. Well, that and I think the drawings make people laugh, and I like that.