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"It's funny, 'cause at this rate, when we're cancelled, us ponies will live on through brony artists' pencils."

The graphical image equivalent to Fan Fic. Can be anything from parody to portraits, technical drawings to erotic indulgences, to Chibis, to all of the above combined.

The most common Art Subjects are from animation (both North American cartoons and anime), since by nature animated characters are designed to be easy to draw. People with an interest in visual arts are also more likely to be animation fans than most others.

As for live-action shows, it takes a certain level of artistic sophistication to depict real people with any degree of recognition. That doesn't stop anyone, however, and any visually interesting or unique show is likely to have some fan-made pieces floating around. Most often these are Speculative Fiction shows, since most fan art based on normal people is more about the actor or actress than the character. Then again, an entire Yahoo! Group is dedicated to celebrity likenesses made with the Poser and FaceGen applications.

In Japan, the majority of Doujinshi are fan art in manga form.

Of course, there's always Rule 34.

And Chibis. Sometimes Chibi Rule 34.

Many Web Comics (particularly ones with recurring characters and good quality artwork) have dedicated fan art galleries on their websites, with images ranging from single characters to full-blown guest strips that don't fit in the archive.

See also Cosplay Fan Art, Rule 63 (for characters drawn as the opposite gender), Canon Illustrations, Side-Story Bonus Art (official art), Self-Fanservice (when canonically unattractive characters look better in the Fan Art).


Fan Artists with their own pages on the wiki:


Examples:

Communities
  • Derpibooru, a Booru-style image board, has grown huge enough to have over 100,000 registered users, houses almost every piece of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fan Art ever made (Excluding what's on their do-not-post list, but including a number of localized artists who don't post anywhere else), and has gone on to develop its own web culture and local memesnote .
  • See DeviantArt here for a large amount of Fan Art (as well as a wide range of original pieces). Beware, though — Sturgeon's Law very much applies. Searching people's favorite artwork galleries can help a lot in finding good work, even more if you share the same taste as those people. If you like someone's artwork, consider checking their "favs".
  • Some Image Boards, like the dreaded 4chan.
  • Furaffinity:
  • There's a website called "Rule 34 - If it exists there IS porn of it". Guess what it's dedicated to. We're not going to link to it.note 
  • For a different kind of fan art also see vgboxart, a site/community that focuses on the creation of Fan Art in the form of covers. It started as a site for video game boxes (hence the name), but now it can be described as generalentertainmentboxart as works vary from games to movies to books. All sorts of Cover Tropes apply for the fan work seen there, a lot of uploads are actually good, and a select few are much better than the official packaging seen in stores.

Creators

Comic Books
  • Osamu Tezuka loved the Disney Duck family stories by Carl Barks and frequently sent greeting cards to him with his own drawings of them interacting with his own characters.
  • The careers of Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld both began with them being noticed for their detailed fan art. This goes for any artist who is working at Marvel or DC. It is very unlikely that there are any artists at the Big Two who hadn't drawn Spider-Man or Batman before being hired.

Fan Works

Films — Animation

  • A notorious historical example was a couple of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio fan drawings found in an old cellar. They were found in Norway, dated to the late 30s, and were signed by a talented amateur artist called "A. H.". Mr. H. has been known to be a major fan of Disney, and he drew a couple of other works too.

Films — Live-Action

  • Gothic Times: "Preacherman and the Union of Funk", "Thou Shall Rise", and "Motley Krue" are Star Wars fan sculptures made of plastic figures of several characters (including Yoda, Jabba, and C-3PO) on carved wood frameworks.

Literature

Mythology & Religion

Podcasts

Theatre

Video Games

Webcomics

Western Animation


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