Daniya Stambekova doesn’t mean to make ugly drawings — they just come out that way.
Her portraits of celebrities, memes and social media influencers have a way of turning anyone into a “Beavis and Butt-Head” character.
Ms. Stambekova, 31, is the artist behind the Instagram account lemme_draw_you. A violinist from Kyrgyzstan, she began making drawings in her spare time and posting them in 2022.
Ms. Stambekova gets her subjects from her For You page on TikTok and from Instagram. She uses videos of them as the basis of caricatures with grotesque or exaggerated features — elongated faces and heads, jagged teeth, oversize ears, dark stubble on men and saturated makeup on women.
The videos play on her Instagram page as they originally appeared for a few seconds. Then, in a quick cut, Ms. Stambekova’s drawing appears with a punctuating sound effect — a horror-film scream or fart sound.
“Let’s say it’s a therapy for me,” Ms. Stambekova wrote in an email. “It helped me deal with depression and anxiety. Plus, I laughed a lot during the process. Sometimes, I’m also surprised, if they are too ugly.”
Many of the videos she chooses, like a clip of the singer Doja Cat stuffing a microphone into her mouth during a concert performance, have an underlying absurdity. She emphasizes that quality in her work.
Others seem to poke fun at male vanity, which can be found in abundance on social media. Through Ms. Stambekova’s etchings, guys who preen for the camera are made to look slightly ridiculous.
Ms. Stambekova, who has 173,000 followers on Instagram, insists that she is not making a social statement. “I post absurdly stupid things,” she wrote. “That’s how I am in real life, and my jokes are the same.”
She added that she will delete a caricature if someone asks, adding that men are more likely than women to object to how she depicts them. “The funny thing is the most ‘good-looking’ men had the most fragile egos,” she wrote. Some of them have sent her threatening messages, she added.
When Ms. Stambekova began posting her drawings, her target audience was people living in countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. But, she said, they complained to Instagram and TikTok, and her original account was banned.
She took a break and restarted in 2023, casting a wider lens. In addition to making art for herself, Ms. Stambekova accepts commissions, charging $30 to draw her followers or their friends. (This reporter asked Ms. Stambekova to draw him.)
Ms. Stambekova said her favorite person to draw was Levi Neufeld, an Australian D.J. He “makes these cringe face expressions,” she wrote, that are perfect for caricaturing.
Ms. Stambekova’s affection for her favorite subject has only grown, she said, because he hasn’t sent her a threatening message to take the drawings down.
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.
The post Her Drawings Poke Fun at Online Attention Seekers appeared first on New York Times.
